writing year in review: 2021

STATS

total number of completed stories: 12
ao3: 6

1 on pyrophane

5 on sulfate

dw: 11 (5 crossposted to ao3)

total word count:

ao3: 4 263

dw: 25 767

total: 30 030

FIC MASTERLIST + INDIVIDUAL COMMENTARY (this is REALLY long)

title: so far away from you lately

fandom: prince of tennis

ship: shiraishi/yukimura, yukimura/kirihara

summary: “Plants are easy,” Yukimura says. “You care for them, you watch them grow. When there’s wilt, you water. When there’s rot, you cut it out at the base. But…” Shiraishi visits Yukimura at the Rikkaidai rooftop gardens.

posted on: sulfate

best lines:

• He has seen, by now, the end of himself reflected with pristine clarity in three sets of irises scintillating with fearless joy, that insurmountable, terrifying height he already knew that first time with Echizen that he would never be able to scale.

• But it always comes back to him. Slowly and bitterly, but unfailingly. What Sanada had given him years and years ago, that surety, that faith. Did he love so lightly, to concede defeat so soon? All those trembling sweating hours in the rehabilitation centre, pain so total it could have cleaved him in half, slicing the weakness, the dead growth out of himself inch by inch, so he could stand on the court again. So he could stand on this rooftop, here with Shiraishi. Sun over their hands, wind in their hair. What an inheritance. What a weight of love.

• All the tightly-furled potential Yukimura had glimpsed in him the first time Kirihara challenged him to a match exploding out of him at last, as Yukimura had known it would; he’d staked everything on it. He had believed, then, that it was worth it. He still does. That’s what he’s tried to give Kirihara, over and over again, on the Rikkaidai courts in the spring of his second year, at Nationals as Kirihara dragged his mangled body back to its feet, at the World Cup facing Tezuka luminescent with the Pinnacle of Perfection on the other side of the net. I have opened the gates for you. Now all you have to do is step through.

• Two years of caring for Kirihara, watching him grow. Yukimura has been careful about cultivating the distance, even as Kirihara’s eyes burned the back of his neck with desperate and badly-concealed longing, to make sure Kirihara will never stop pushing himself, reaching forward. He does not fear the possibility of being overtaken, but he almost wishes he did. He is waiting, as ever, for Kirihara to surprise him.

commentary:

• my shirayukiaka mentorship legacy thesis… i already did a lengthy dvd commentary <here> but i’m so glad i did actually write this one even though i struggled so much with yukimura pov, i really wanted to explain the key parts of what makes yukiaka my tennis 推しカプ and i think i did alright on the meta front. it’s like barely romantic at all but that’s what is so romantic about it. To Me. yukiaka is so romantic because it isn’t!! it's about the outgoing leader->incoming leader mentorship of someone you recognise yourself in and whose potential you believe so strongly in except you are a fucked up person so you fuck him up while trying to make him into the best version of himself but he needed to be fucked up in order to reach that height and he loves/fears/envies/admires/loves you for what you have done to him and what you represent
• i think the opening is pretty weak but the ending is really REALLY good, which is a problem that plagues all my fic, so like… It Could Be Worse? i’m not too mad about it though like it’s not so bad that i would exit the tab if i were reading at the start so i hope the bangerful ending makes up for it

title: we were gambling to win

fandom: prince of tennis

ship: oshitari/jirou, atobe/oshitari, atobe/jirou

summary: the dubcon somno voyeurism power dynamics femslash for today

posted on: rhodochrosite

best lines:

• She has the distinct impression of being manoeuvred around on a chessboard towards an unknown endgame, but she’s trusted Atobe to lead her true since first year and she supposes she has no reason to doubt her now. Atobe is always playing the long game, the visionary strategist to Oshitari’s tactician, even if Oshitari isn’t sure what Atobe’s vision here is other than enabling a weird threesome.

• "You see, I'm not in the habit of thinking about Rikkaidai members sexually." [redacted] "I can only imagine the experience would be like a praying mantis ripping the head off her partner after mating. Please, no comments about what you plan to do to Tezuka."

Atobe does her princess laugh. "But I very much want Tezuka alive," she says.

• Oshitari is drawing closer to the point where the short-term shades into the long-term, the region of overlap between her expertise and Atobe's. They have been caught in this balancing act for three years, but Oshitari still does not know whether she is the one gaining on Atobe, or vice versa.

commentary:

• i had such a horrible time writing femslash porn last year i don’t know what possessed me to try to do it again 😭 but i was really gripped by the hyotei elite bitchy cliquey private school girls vision… writing this and working out my concept of atooshi literally made me become atooshi main. I LOVE 1FOR1SHIPPING and unofficial leader x second in command dynamics and situations that seem like they could be triangulation but are actually just chill and tension-free
• i really liked oshitari’s pov i love longsuffering thinker types and the atooshi banter was also very fun to write… also reading back over this some of oshitari’s narration is legitimately funny to me. this fic may not be sexy but it IS pretty funny and in-character

title: feel you most when i’m alone

fandom: prince of tennis

ship: yagyuu/niou

summary: revenge murder and dismemberment as a bodyswap bonding activity

posted on: rhodochrosite

best lines:

• Buoyed by a surge of savagely delirious euphoria, her front drenched with blood, gripping the handle of the knife so tightly she couldn’t feel her fingers, she’d forgotten for a moment who she was, made a motion to push up a pair of glasses she wasn’t wearing. Niou’s arrival, timely after all, had settled her. It’s always easier to define herself by negative space, a mirror in which she can see what she isn’t.

• Niou’s eyes kindle. The breathless exhilaration on her face reflecting Yagyuu’s, as if it really had been Niou in Yagyuu’s place earlier, as if their switch is rooted in something deeper and more profound than a handful of cosmetic adjustments, some alchemy of deconstruction and reconstruction at its core that enables a true exchange of self. Yagyuu slides her hand lower, curling her fingers around the column of Niou’s neck. The visible trail of her touch mapped out in dark red across Niou’s skin. Now the deed belongs to both of them. Niou’s pulse slams against the heel of Yagyuu’s palm, insistent and frantic, a dead giveaway.

• “Are you scared?” Yagyuu murmurs.

“No,” Niou says.

“You’re a bad liar.”

“I’m the best liar,” Niou says. She tilts her head. “Or maybe I’m not. Who am I right now?”

“Does it matter?”

Niou’s eyes narrow, a thoughtful, deliberate motion. “I thought it did to you.”

Yagyuu says, with careful emphasis, “You’ve certainly been the corruptive influence.”

Niou snorts. “It’s not corruption if you were always—”

Yagyuu leans forward and kisses the rest of the words out of Niou’s mouth, feeling Niou’s heartbeat ratchet up against her hand, Niou’s body tensing up in alarm before loosening into Yagyuu’s hold. The taste of tar and ash behind Niou’s teeth, another dead giveaway. One of these days Niou will stop forcibly suppressing her body’s instincts of flight, whenever Yagyuu comes close. Perhaps she has triaged the risk and doesn't care. Perhaps she is unaccustomed to the existence of a danger greater than her own. Yagyuu remembers their first switch, Niou’s stunned delight as she’d said you’re worse than I am. How fiercely Niou has clung to that delight in the intervening period, as though to prevent it from metamorphosing into anything close to fear.

commentary:

• omg i’m shocked by how much i like this one on reread, i didn’t think it was that good when i first posted it but i really did get down the gist of my 82 thesis… a bit sad i can never post this one to ao3 because it’s blatant spitefic. but yagyuu (and specifically nyota yagyuu) really is like the perfect narrative pov for my prose style, the polite british high society formality + repressed seething violent intensity fits the way i write so well and i think this fic has the most natural feeling narration out of everything i wrote this year, the meta parts are blended into the actual fic with somewhat more finesse than most of the other fic i wrote this year
• more dvd commentary <here> but i’m like so especially impressed by how GOOD the dialogue is like i really went hard on the multiple layers of meaning and ambiguity of who exactly is talking to who… good job me… spite literally works sometimes

title: talk like an open book

fandom: prince of tennis

ship: zaizen & koharu & yuuji, zaizen -> kenya

summary: koharu and yuuji take their beloved kouhai out for afterschool snacks and love life counselling

posted on: rhodochrosite

best lines:

• Zaizen has, in fact, been avoiding them—Haruko moreso than Yuuri, but Yuuri takes the whole one-flesh-one-mind thing very seriously and is never too far from Haruko's vicinity—for reasons that are a roughly sixty-forty split between knowing that Haruko will see through him within two minutes of conversation, and not wanting to test if he can handle the patented Haruko-and-Yuuri saccharine loved-up modus operandi.

• Zaizen mumbled something like Kenya-san should be more careful and Shiraishi laughed and said, maybe he’d listen if he heard it from you.

• That’s generally when Zaizen’s self-preservation instincts kick in and cut the mental cameras. Zaizen isn’t a dreamer. In the Shitenhoji vocabulary of demented idealism this makes him a defeatist, though he isn’t that either; he has a healthy respect for his own skills. Zaizen’s no data specialist, but he’s got good instincts, match routes unfolding or closing up with every shot, and he knows an unwinnable set of circumstances when he sees it.

• “Oh, Zaizen-chan,” Haruko says, squeezing Zaizen’s hand. The terrifying acuity of Shitenhoji’s best gamemaker gleaming out of her eyes, no less keen for its sympathy. “It’s only your first love. You’ll have other loves. You’re cute and handsome and everyone will want to be with you. I know, I know, you don’t want everyone,” Haruko adds, lifting a finger daintily. “You only want Kenya-kun.”

“I didn’t say that,” Zaizen mutters.

“It might feel like the end of the world now, but in a few years time you won’t even remember it,” Haruko continues, as if Zaizen hadn’t spoken at all. “The capacity of the human brain to recall pain, or really any kind of immediate perceptual memory, is ve~ry limited.”

Zaizen exhales carefully, through his teeth. “Look, senpai, no offense, but I just—I don’t want to hear it from you. Right now.”

commentary:

• my attempt at gay indie coming of age story lmfaooo i’m glad i pushed my comfort zone and wrote this one because it’s an important part of my tennis agenda world and i needed to have it in my body of work. probably one of the worse fics i wrote this year but you know… i tried. and sometimes that is all that matters
• i suffered deeply trying to figure out a believable Group Tsukkomi zaizen pov and i think i did okay, and i also think i got the insufferable ott gay energy of rbrs but genuine emotional concern for their fave kouhai underneath the performance. so at least the characterisation holds up i think

title: with the door wide open no one can leave

fandom: prince of tennis

ship: niou/marui

summary: Yukimura has always been the furthest-seeing one of them all. Or: Niou and Marui, after their world ends.

posted on: rhodochrosite (nyota ver) + sulfate

best lines:

• The Child of God, in his infinite benevolence, extending a chance for redemption to Sanada, to Yanagi, to Kirihara. And the flipside: his closed fist pulping the rest of them, a necessary sacrifice for his grand rebirth. How perfectly he’d orchestrated it. An exact inversion of their Kanto results. Yukimura has always been the furthest-seeing one of them all.

• Yukimura’s love is an impersonal thing, scalar and directionless.

• What does Niou know about love? Singles Two against Fuji, sweat plastering his jersey to his back. He’d squinted past the haze of Illusion and the sun-glare to Yukimura on the bench, the steel trap of Yukimura's game face giving nothing away. And then, a little beyond Yukimura, Yagyuu seated in the stands with his hands clasped primly in his lap. It was too far to tell for sure what expression Yagyuu was wearing; Niou could guess, could conjure up the mirror on his own face, but he wanted the reassurance of absolute certainty. He felt like he was moving through honey. His left elbow had the blown-out deadened feeling of anaesthesia, a pain staved off. Briefly, childishly, he wished Yukimura's mouth would relax into a smile. He was no Kirihara, but in that moment he probably would have cut off a limb for a visible sliver of Yukimura’s approval.

• Tell me something. When you were watching me play, up there in the stands, Niou said. What were you thinking?

I was hoping for your victory, of course, Yagyuu said.

Not an answer! Niou said.

What would you like me to say?

I don’t fucking know, Niou said. That’s why I’m asking. I’m—would you have done it differently? If it were you?

The lenses flashed as Yagyuu tilted his head. But I am not you, Niou-kun, he said. It would hardly be productive to speculate.

Niou wrenched his wrist free. His skin prickled, a sensation halfway to how the mantle of Illusion felt settling over him, but he was only himself, and Yagyuu was only Yagyuu, and they had been inside each other’s skins but they were not touching anymore, though Yagyuu was barely a hand’s breadth away. Suddenly Niou ached with incompleteness. One more person on his side of the court; it was all he wanted.

commentary:

• i really wanted this to be better than it ended up T__T it’s about an extremely vital part of my tennis vision due to being my 3byuki thesis + my yukimura-rigged-nats-finals conspiracy theory but i think you can really tell the parts where i was trying too hard to convey the meta aspects and it’s jarring because it doesn’t blend well into the actual fic part of this fic
• i think it’s also a bit too obvious that i was struggling so hard with how to end this fic so i just cut it off randomly
• on the bright side i think this niou voicing is not too bad considering my chronic writing equivalent of sameface syndrome!

title: don’t look the other way

fandom: prince of tennis

ship: yukimura/marui

summary: Devotion alone can sustain a god. Or: Marui visits Yukimura in the hospital.

posted on: rhodochrosite + sulfate

best lines:

• These days Yukimura has the thinly clean smell of generic soap. It isn’t unpleasant, in the way that nothing about Yukimura could be unpleasant, but it lacks recognisability. Everything about Yukimura’s presence is supposed to be distinctive, overwhelming. Even squashed shoulder-to-hip beside Marui he should take up more space than he does. Marui knows Yukimura on instinct, but the blade of the reflex is dulled. Yukimura’s memory swallows up Yukimura himself. This is, by now, an old sadness.

• “Yips,” Yukimura says cheerfully. His grin takes up the entirety of Marui’s field of vision. “Now you can’t move.”

The tips of Yukimura’s hair tickle at Marui’s jaw. Looking up at him, Marui’s heart stutters in fear, in hope. Longing that could cleave his chest in half. “You’re really getting better?”

• Absence, Marui understands. The seven of them locked in tense orbit around the blank of a missing body. But even with its heart sliced out Rikkaidai will not fold. They’ve made sure of that.

• A serve-and-volley player is constantly crossing the widest possible distance in tennis, baseline to net, so Marui has always parsed observation through its tiered gradations, the broadest strokes all the way down to the minutiae of finest detail, the view from afar and up close synthesised into a single image.

commentary:

• the better 3byuki fic except it’s stillllll not as good as i wish it were and niou isn’t even in it. except it also has probably the best line i wrote all year (Yukimura’s memory swallows up Yukimura himself.) so that’s a redeeming factor. and i think the characterisation and the dynamic is really good, it’s just that i sacrificed like. pacing. and writing an actual fic. in service of creating a vehicle to say what i wanted to say about the yukibun dynamic
• i consciously try to personalise my figurative language to the pov character so it’s not just like Any Random Metaphor but actually something with meaning in the context of the story itself too, except the execution was like laughably clumsy here… the cat’s cradle simile makes me die (derogatory)
• i really like writing precanon fic because i’ve increasingly realised this year that there’s nothing i love more than doom and inevitability and foregone conclusions, i like the external terror of characters desperately believing in an outcome that the audience knows will never happen!! and i think i did a good job with the dramatic irony through the last section where yukimura tells marui he wouldn’t want anyone to go through what he’s gone through (when we know in shinteni marui inflicts injury requiring similar painful physical therapy on tohno for yukimura’s sake but w/o yukimura’s knowledge → so it’s like the added guilt marui feels knowing yukimura expressly wouldn’t have wanted him to do it at all but marui loves yukimura so much he’s still willing to break his own AND yukimura’s moral codes in order to save yukimura) + yukimura saying he won’t break his promise (when we know rikkai loses at nats)

title: the future is mine

fandom: prince of tennis

ship: ootori/shishido

summary: Ootori delays the inevitable, indefinitely.

posted on: rhodochrosite + sulfate

best lines:

• Ootori still has something of an instinctive aversion to serving in Shishido’s direction when Shishido isn’t even holding a racquet, despite the countless grim hours they’d spent doing exactly that after Tokyo Prefecturals; that bitter, harrowing week in Ootori’s memory has the unreal sheen of a hallucination or a mirage now. But Shishido’d dismissed the concern when Ootori raised it. You won’t hit me, he’d said. Your control’s too good for that.

• Briefly it disappears from view at the apex of its flight, obscured by the sun, but Ootori doesn’t need to see it to guess precisely where it will fall. His soul knows. Faith drives his racquet forward.

• Shishido’s shadow falls over him, before his face appears in Ootori’s field of vision. Ootori blinks the sunbursts away, sense of vertigo flaring up, receding again. Distance restores itself. Separation and spaces between every single thing. He lets his arm fall back to his side.

commentary:

• i’m glad i could dip my toes into my favourite trope of all time LOTUS EATER DREAMS and i think i did an ok job with the Something Is Slightly Off atmosphere + the dreamlike calm vs the bursts of desperation in ootori’s narration that make it clear that he is working really hard to maintain that calm. ootori has the highest emotional stakes in the 3rd years graduating due to the fragility of his new truelove romance with shishido so he seemed like a natural fit for the trope. i'm most happy with the Distance=Relief motif set against ootori's separation anxiety because like regency era pining energy
• i also really love like… personifying schools? like making the school its own kind of character. i really got that feeling off hyotei in the game of future prologue story this fic was inspired by so i wanted to give hyotei the school a strong sense of presence as well. i spent a lot of time thinking about hyotei's clubroom and tennis courts and hyotei as an institution but it probably didn't come through very well in the fic because it's quite stylistically sparse (for me. i'm a chronic overwriter so this IS restraint to me)

title: keep the life that i’ve got

fandom: prince of tennis

ship: ryoga & ryoma

summary: ryoga’s planet-sized brother complex

posted on: rhodochrosite

best lines:

• He enjoys the rush of a high-stakes gamble as much as the next guy, but there’s something to be said about the security of a foregone conclusion. Fixed matches, uneven odds, stacked lineups; he likes dealing in guarantees. Luck and fate and the fluid boundary separating the two, always in flux.

• Still, he thinks Ryoma had been happy, too. Playing him. At least towards the end, when there had been only each other, no teams or messy loyalties to muddy the waters, the ship emptied of everything except for him and Ryoma and the tennis they shared. Surely the recognition was reciprocated. Surely Ryoma saw in Ryoga, too, some part of himself, something he could point to and say I know you, I remember you, we were each other's before we were anything else.

• Water breaching the hull of the ship and the hunger had torn through him the same way. But Ryoma's still got a long way to go to the top and Ryoga wants to see him reach the pinnacle first, so he'd hauled the halves of himself shut, taken the temporary defeat.

• So he'll win, and he'll eat his brother. He'll swallow Ryoma whole, all his monstrous strength and incandescent potential. Ryoma's tennis will burn so bright it'll light Ryoga up from the inside and then everyone will see what they are to each other. Everything that makes up Echizen Ryoma ensconced safely inside Ryoga and he'll keep him so close nothing could ever sever them from one another again, not even themselves.

Or maybe it'll be the other way around. Maybe it will be Ryoga brought to his knees, emptied clean out, racquet clattering to the ground. Ryoma's teeth coming down hard on his heart. He wouldn't even mind, if things were to end like that. It's not like Ryoma hasn't been keeping his heart in ungraceful custody since the day they met, anyway.

commentary:

• i have zero memory of writing this but i think it was probably the combination of becoming obsessed with ryoga via tnrb valentine’s event + rewatching cruise + catching up to the echizen brothers chapters in shinteni + generally rotating echizen brothers on tl thanks to some rather emotionally damaging fanart… it still gets me every time how ryoga is generally a really terrible person but he is so totally devoted to ryoma… and ryoma doesn’t even want it from ryoga!! ryoga is charming and talented and resourceful and lacking in morality enough to get anything he wants but the only thing he really wants (HIS BROTHER’S LOVE…) he can’t have
• i think there’s definitely too much navelgazing (haha navel. Like the orange. get it.) in this fic and not enough Stuff Actually Happening to balance it out so the pacing is extremely strange. but if you think of this as an echizen brothers metapost and not a fic then it’s probably ok. this was really the main problem that plagued all my fic this year, all of it was just poorly disguised metaposting. which is generally what all my fic is but i didn’t put enough effort into properly ficifying anything because i had so many ideas i wanted to finish, so they’re all riddled with severe pacing and voicing and flow problems...

title: racing down that hill but you never fall

fandom: prince of tennis

ship: kai/rin

summary: kai does hirakoba's hair while they talk about kite

posted on: rhodochrosite

best lines:

• Rin's pale hair shines silver in the low light, more familiar to Kai now than its original black. It can't have been that long ago when he’d first gone blond but it feels half a lifetime away. Rin’s hair had only just hit his chin back then. He was still wrangling the curvature of the Giant Habu under Kite's instruction, prone to impatient outbursts when the ball wouldn’t go where he wanted it to go that inevitably led to heated rows with Kite, the sound of their bickering a background fixture of that summer in Kai’s memory. Sun on his shoulders, the grip of his racquet worn smooth in his left hand, and Kite and Rin spitting fire at each other the next court down.

• Kai doesn't think he's ever seen Rin put his hair up. Kite mentioned offhand once in a rare moment of uncritical honesty that he liked Rin's hair and Rin's been keeping it long ever since, though neither of them will acknowledge this.

• “It’s our year,” Kai says. The reflection of his face floating beside Rin’s. These are Kite’s words, too. He wonders if there’s an echo of Kite in his voice, that intensity he’s brought them all to inhabit. Whether Rin hears Kai, or if he’s remembering how Kite sounded when he first said it to them, or both overlapping, like everything else Kite has given them: their appearances, their tennis, their dream.

commentary:

• from the peak of my higa oshi phase… i love henchmanshipping so much. i think it’s so good that kairin are like bff classmates and also super captain complexed about kite but in a way that’s separate to their relationship with each other, but still unmistakably present. like it's about kite but not about kite at all
• there’s too much tension between kai’s stupid dogs narrative voice and my natural prose style and i think it gets overly obvious at times because i’m really bad at writing any type of narrator that isn’t like british private school asshole so i keep slipping back into that style even if it’s completely at odds with the pov i’m writing… it’s too much of a challenge i probably won’t do it again. any more higa fic will have to be kite pov only

title: to the victorious tomorrow

fandom: prince of tennis

ship: niou & kirihara

summary: yugioh arc v au, niou and kirihara infiltrate seigaku

posted on: rhodochrosite

best lines:

• He zeroes in with laser accuracy right on where Kirihara's standing half-hidden by shadow on the stairs, seriously, does he have fucking x-ray vision or something, and Niou Masaharu, Major-General of Academia and major pain in Kirihara’s ass, an entire dimension away from where he’s supposed to be, lazily makes the Rikkai Force hand signal for all clear at Kirihara.

• Kirihara is kind of uncertain whether Tezuka speaks at all; he seemed to have challenged Echizen to a duel via externally-impenetrable telepathically-communicative stare that made Kirihara abruptly, viciously homesick.

commentary:

• spitefic written due to my intense hate for evil the movie and its mistreatment and erasure of nioukiri but it didn’t turn out very good so i still didn’t win. this is part of the really complicated tennis x arc v fusion universe in my mind i think like… i was really struggling with kirihara’s narrative voice, and also the massive world i had built in my head, very little of which is actually in the fic itself, so this fic is like a pretty mediocre execution of a really really good concept (to me)
• the section with the ranking leaderboards is my favourite even tho i don’t think it has any standout prose, i borrowed the idea from idol survival shows and i think it’s a really solid headcanon for the cutthroat competitiveness i imagine academia embodies. really great encapsulation of the way this fic is soooo premise >> execution

title: the only way out is to give in

fandom: detective conan

ship: akai/amuro

summary: But it doesn’t matter what he’s looking for now, Rye’s cold violence or Okiya’s solicitous courtesy or the man at the core of both, the shadow he’s been chasing for years and years.

posted on: rhodochrosite + sulfate

best lines:

• Amuro’s seen Vermouth slip in and out of identities with the perfection of water filling the shape of its vessel; he’s done the process himself. So if Okiya is only a construct, anybody else could inhabit him for a night as a diversionary tactic while Akai moved elsewhere. Highway standoff at night, voice over the phone, and Amuro had been right all along in the conviction he refused to characterise as faith.

• So much of him has warped around the memory and the betrayal and the hunger for vengeance spiralling out from it that he doesn’t know what would be left of him after it’s carved out. How he'd felt looking in the mirror after Vermouth had finished working on him and seeing the face he could never forget reflected back at him, as though there really was some part of himself that was also inextricably Akai and now it had been brought to life.

• “I’m not a detective like you, so I don’t know if I can explain it in a way you can understand. I’m only an engineer,” Okiya says. Moonlight and shadow. He looks so unlike himself he’s almost recognisable again. “I think in terms of systems. Which parts are built to bear which loads, and which are not.” He touches Amuro’s cheek. Abrupt and inexplicable yearning to turn his face into Okiya’s hold; Amuro nearly comes undone. “There are some weights that even an extraordinary waiter may not be so suited to carrying. But I don’t think I could stop you from trying.”

• The sense of vertigo crescendos. Again he can’t shake the nauseous doomed feeling that everything he’s done, everything he will do, has been seen through already. Fate closing in around all of his selves like a garrotte.

commentary:

• the actual porn is like… ugh… but i’ve always hated writing porn anyway. but i think the non-porn parts of this fic are surprisingly really good… the atmosphere is good, the i-know-that-you-know-that-i-know dialogue between okiya and amuro is solid, the sense of dramatic irony and extreme denial works pretty well, the confirmation bias split conversation feels authentically like something that could happen in canon
• i edited it a little when i crossposted onto ao3 but my conceptualisation of ryebourbon has evolved too much since i wrote this fic so the takes are a bit too reductive here, but not so much that it can’t be chalked up to unreliable narration so i think i can still give myself a pass
• also the narrator name switch at the end is sooo gimmicky and cliche but it’s satisfying TO ME though i definitely won’t be able to get away with reusing this narrative device lol
• but ultimately i'm really happy i wrote my own sacred text for my ship of the year, i think this is probably my personal favourite work this year despite its flaws

title: waiting for you to move on

fandom: nct

ship: jaemin/renjun

summary: Renjun runs into his former business partner at the worst possible time.

posted on: pyrophane

best lines:

• It shouldn’t be surprising that Jaemin is still fluent in this, the process of taking him apart like a favoured gun. Jaemin is as much a creature of habit as Renjun is unable to resist the lure of nostalgia, two facets of the same tendency. Both of them always caught halfway to turning back, one foot in the past.

• Every time Renjun runs into Mark while he’s working, Mark does his heartfelt best to sway him to the side of law enforcement via impassioned speechmaking about Renjun’s inherent goodness while smashing Renjun into buildings, cars, or whatever other unforgiving surface is closest. He’s pretty sure Mark doesn’t know Renjun can’t actually heal himself and generally relies on a combination of timely escape manoeuvres and close working relationships with people in possession of healing powers to maintain a functional body; Mark would go easy on him if he did. Sometimes Renjun wants Mark to go easy on him. But if Renjun relents an inch he’ll give in entirely.

• The Jaemin in his memory is more distinct than the figure in front of him, blurred through the filter of involuntary tears. Like this the old affection rises so easily. How much he’d liked Jaemin when they were younger, how simple it had felt. What changed? Nothing. Everything. He drags a hand up to touch the corner of Jaemin’s mouth, feeling its upwards quirk underneath his fingertips.

commentary:

• blatantly akam inspired? it’s like beat for beat exactly the same fic as the only way out is to give in except kind of worse and i was uncomfortably aware of this while writing LOL but i really did want to drag pyrophane out of the grave at least once this year and i guess 2pick otp 1s and 0s is a reliable way to do it… i always used to feel kind of embarrassed about all my jmrn fic being explicit but it’s fine actually. as you may know i have a very difficult relationship with jmrn so like i will do whatever mental gymnastics allow me to actually write for my main agenda
• i personally had a good chuckle over titling this with a friends - chase atlantic lyric since it’s like 70% this song’s fault i got into jmrn in the first place so i feel like *tuxedo mask* my job here is done. except it’s not because i still have to finish dreampuri. but other than that my job here is done!!

META MASTERLIST

total word count: 37 790

• yuryo complex relationships shipping meme
• favourite ship dynamics
• ai and the weight of grief
• top 5 canon yugioh hets
• detective conan ep review 1-500
• being fixed preferences fucker
• the killer (pt 1 / pt 2)
• my ideal 1s and 0s
• 1140 dynamics summary
• favourite akam triangulations
• identity in detective conan
• akam secret 5 AR conversation analysis
• akam secret 4 AR conversation analysis
• detective conan gundam reference compilation
• top 5 canon conan hets
• detective conan plot predictions
• rye/bourbon dynamic hypothesising

CURRENT WIPS

jaemren dreampuri (4.8k) - I WILL FINISH THIS I SWEAR TO GOD. one more snippet for everyone’s agonies:

On some level he’s always aware of Renjun’s presence, with a clarity just a knife’s edge sharper than the way he’s always aware of everything. He doesn’t think he watches Renjun more than he watches the others, but it’s what he imagines that preternatural two-body extension of focus in doubles is like, maybe the closest he’ll get as a singles player.

ryebourbon casefic (1.2k) - it’s just omegaverse pwp without the porn part LOL bourbon’s heat gets triggered when the target drugs him on a honeytrap mission and he tries to get rye to fuck him so rye has to knock him out. i got massively distracted by rye and vermouth alpha posturing at each other after all that and haven’t written the actual ryebourbon part yet but i do want to use this fic as a vehicle to explain my ryebourbon vision. i also originally planned to have a second part set in the future with the same premise where they do actually fuck but i’m just really not in the mood to write porn so idk:

3 AM brings Vermouth to the safehouse door. She must have come directly from a mission; under her perfume, the faintly metallic reek of artificial pheromones still clings to her like her velvet cocktail dress. Something generically omega this time, a lush floral headache suggestive of the brink of a heat. Rye’s fingers twitch on the door, irritated urge to slam it shut in her face.

“Well, Rye?” The distinct note of amusement in Vermouth’s light drawl. “Aren’t you going to let me in?”

kir & bourbon relationship study (0.8k) - i spend too much time tweeting about how funny i think kirbourbon’s hypothetical coworkers dynamic is due to the whole, kir killed the guy bourbon repeatedly publicly declared was his to kill and she didn’t even care about it that much thing, and not enough time actually writing my kir thesis but i would really like to invent the interiority that kir deserves. and push my scotchkir vermouthkir agendas:

He inclines his head in greeting. "Kir," he says.

And this is another test in the long series she’s had to undergo ever since her codename came to an uneasy rest on her neck, more a guillotine than a title. The men Vermouth associates with closely enough to allow access to her private quarters is a vanishingly short list, even before the additional filter of Rena's limited recognition. She knows Gin. Calvados is dead. Cognac is in Switzerland, the last Rena heard. That leaves—

"Bourbon," she responds. Wary now.

What does she know about Bourbon? Next to nothing. That he is one of the Organisation's most brilliant minds. That he believes Akai Shuichi to be alive. A necessary corollary of that belief is that she must therefore be a liar and a traitor. One word from Bourbon to Gin and the blade comes down.

amuro & akemi ghosts of christmas past (0.5k) - this fic is so profoundly stupid and melodramatic and self-indulgent but as if it’s my fault i love writing about people talking to ghosts of their loved ones!!! i'm also blatantly ripping off what i did in the jmrn dream scene in antithesis/synthesis where i don't name the dead person in the narration until the very end but it's hopefully very obvious from the conversation who they are but i love this trope so much:

She smiles. This too is unchanged. A perfect transposition across time onto her adult face and the familiarity is like a knife between the ribs. “It’s been a while, Rei-kun,” she says.

“I,” he says. “Ah,” he says. He blinks, twice. He swallows. “Yes. It’s been a while.”

“I’m sorry I forgot you,” she says. “Though it worked out for the best, I think…”

Amuro laughs, rueful. “Certainly it made maintaining my cover easier,” he says. Then, more quietly: “I never forgot you.”

“You’ve never been the type to forget,” she says.

REFLECTIONS

looking back, did you expect to write more fic than you thought you would this year, less, or about what you’d expected?

ok way more than i expected, i was putting this list together and got genuinely shocked i had written 12 entire fics because i feel like i spent ⅔ of this year just not writing. the intense tennis-fuelled productivity of the first few months of 2021 really hardcarried my stats… more importantly i intended to finish dreampuri this year and i didn’t, so that was kind of disappointing. 30k is still shockingly high to me even though it's comparatively low compared to previous years... plus the 38k i wrote in meta ctfu.

what pairing/genre/fandom did you write that you would never have predicted in January?

i swear halfway through every year i get into some random canon out of nowhere and this year it was detective conan. it’s not really reflected in my fic output since i only wrote one fic for them but i wrote a truly ridiculous amount of meta and honestly i think the main reason i didn’t write more fic is because the fandom is soooo massive and so closely aligned with my tastes that pretty much everything i want to see already exists and i can eat it for free (well… for the price of agonisingly brute forcing japanese literacy. and also real prices too because i started buying doujins but let’s not get into that). one of the most successful baitings i’ve ever experienced fr thank you mich <3 up there with tennis. i'm very happy to be here!

did you take any writing risks this year? what did you learn from them?

pretty sure everything i wrote this year was really squarely in my comfort zone, i think the hardest thing i put myself through was zaizen pov in talk like an open book because i was randomly super insecure about his narrative voice even after reading his tnrb stories several times and i find the shiten clownery → emotional anguish balance really hard to strike and i also didn’t like rbrs when i started writing the fic but predictably enough i wrote myself into liking them. but i guess the moral of the story is that if i’m sufficiently unhinged about a specific concept that i have already fully rotated in my mind and also in the mood to test my abilities then i can do anything! not necessarily well but i can get it done. but the threshold for this is sooooo high idk how to put myself back in the mindset so in essence i once again learned nothing.

best story of the year?

i wasn’t really especially happy with anything i wrote this year but i guess maybe… feel you most when i’m alone, i think the tone and characterisation and atmosphere and dialogue are all really good and there are some super nice lines in there. it’s also really accurate to how i think of 2882, which may seem like that should be a given as i wrote it but the thing is that my views rarely represent my views so this is quite unusual for me.

most popular story of the year?

most people never get a single high school rival for the second year in a row LOL happy 5k kudos to her. but in terms of fic i actually posted this year then waiting for you to move on which was also the only one to break 30 kudos. what it's like maining fandoms that have completely dead english fandom presences... but i was very relieved i still had a little bit of reach in nct ficdom even after peacing out for a year T__T

most fun story to write:

feel you most when i’m alone because it’s true that spite is a fantastic motivator and sometimes you do have to write about a character you hate getting brutally murdered in order to rebalance your head. but really i think this year i had much more fun writing meta than writing fic.

hardest story to write:

after the mass productivity of my tennisfics i just like didn’t write at all for months and months so um… Everything Was So Hard To Write. i feel like i was crying screaming so much over waiting for you to move on in particular because i always find porn really difficult and i was also feeling deeply insecure about my ability to write nct after not writing them for so long and i had just written like exactly the same fic in concept for detective conan so i was trying so hard not to plagiarise myself and then having like regular despairing breakdowns over how everything i write is exactly the same and my brain is a barren wasteland devoid of creativity etc etc and after all that i still didn’t like the result. but also this usually happens every time i write and then after i finish i’m like that wasn’t that bad actually i want to do that again. so it’s possible it could just be the recency effect talking since this was the last fic i wrote and it’s fresh in my memory and maybe it really wasn't that bad. i have goldfish memory.

favourite opening lines:

from talk like an open book:

Yuuri ambushes him right as he’s stepping out of the clubroom, loping derangedly out of the bushes as though she’d been lying in wait for him there and slinging an arm around Zaizen’s shoulders like a human lasso. Zaizen splutters under the sudden weight, and splutters again when it doubles, as Haruko attaches herself to his other side and bears down on his arm with all her not-inconsiderable might.

i am so bad at opening lines it’s unreal but this one does give me a good chuckle :) and i think it sets the tone of the story well! every other opening line i wrote this year ranges from awful to I Guess It’s There And Opening The Story so the competition is not that tough.

favourite ending lines:

from the only way out is to give in:

The man underneath him opens his eyes. The creases evening out into distinctive lines. That unmistakeable green. Barriers to the true self falling away. Against his will Furuya’s breath catches, the sound too loud in the quiet lull of the night. His head reels, a vertiginous dizziness cresting. He curls his fingers around the column of Akai’s neck, thumb digging into the soft hollow right underneath his jaw, and Akai just lets him, inert in the way that a live mine is inert, that infinite sniper’s patience that Furuya has always, always hated about him. Watching him with an intent light in his eyes that Furuya doesn’t know how to read.

What he does know: Akai’s heartbeat under his thumb, mockingly even. Incontrovertible proof of life. Furuya tightens his grip. Bourbon killed someone like this, once; pinned the target to his own bed and strangled him to death while Rye and Scotch kept watch over the exits. He could crush Akai’s trachea now, before Akai could even lift a hand. One sharp blow to the throat and it would be over. The sense of vertigo crescendos. Again he can’t shake the nauseous doomed feeling that everything he’s done, everything he will do, has been seen through already. Fate closing in around all of his selves like a garrotte.

“I’m going to kill you,” Furuya says. Unsteady thunder of blood in his ears. His hands are shaking. “I swear it, I’m going to kill you. Akai Shuichi.”

Akai smiles. In the voice Furuya would know anywhere, he says, gently, “I’ll be waiting.”

not to c/p like half the whole fic in here and i know i already put part of this in the best lines section for this particular fic but i really really do think this was so good and romantic and like terror inducing. possibly the most romantic thing i’ve ever written in my life!! i literally managed to get myself rereading which basically never happens with my own fic. it may be exactly the same concept as rtfbt’s ending but it’s better.

i feel like i managed to convey what i wanted ie → amuro simultaneously totally believing that he wants to and can kill akai but also trying to convince himself of both because he doesn’t really believe it at all… and akai knowing that amuro doesn’t truly want to kill him but even if he did he wouldn’t be able to anyway so either way he isn’t worried… but akai would let him if he really did want to… kind of chef’s kiss if i do say so myself. like everything is about the symbolic gesture rather than the content of the action itself, amuro threatening akai’s life but only because akai is allowing him and both of them being extremely aware of the power dynamic but like Not Addressing It but everything is really deliberate and frustratingly so for amuro but he can’t(/won't) escape. and ofc... DOOM is the most romantic thing in the universe!

goals for the new year:

FIRSTLY I WILL FINISH DREAMPURI OR DIE TRYING. i would also really like to write fic for itzy and/or aespa!! i’ve been meaning to write idolverse ryeji for like uhh 2 years now but i’ve forgotten everything from my brief foray into itzy meta so i’ll have to start from scratch again… as for aespa i know beautiful fantakens of girls looking expensive and deadly is not lore but it could be. To Me. i’m preliminarily 2picking ningning and winter and since i love 1) 2pickshipping 2) 1for1shipping aka beybladeshipping 3) nominative determinism (WINNING is the best ship name ever) 4) triangulation (karina obviously) so things are looking positively in this direction. i usually prefer to start with idolverse fic to get a handle on the dynamics in canon context but i really want to write SPY AU (once again blatantly stealing elements from detective conan as the primary source of all my spy genre knowledge) where like winter is a rogue agent who used to be part of the organisation the others belong to and winter and ningning keep running into e/o on clashing missions and it’s simultaneously about karina and also not. maybe they will also have superpowers i do love gratuitous superpowers. maybe in the same verse as waiting for you to move on.

for fpf i obviously have a slew of detective conan fic plans and everything already in my current wips, i’m also expecting that bride of halloween will put me in a super k組 mood so i might stop daydreaming about academy era hagimatsufuru 3p devirginisation and actually write it lol. i’m just like… very bad at writing porn in general but especially porn that is supposed to be funny and sweet and not anguishedly fucked up and full of emotional baggage.

umm… overall i think i like lost all the progress i made last year re: writing for myself and just having fun because i am mostly back to the old miserable me who needs external validation to live but i think maybe that mindset was just not sustainable considering my personality. i still enjoy writing things catering just to myself but i’m finding it really hard to motivate myself lately, especially because i’m also so busy with school. i’m also aware that i nearly always experience severe creative burnout around the end of the year which is giving me a really negative outlook on everything and that last year's positivity was an anomaly but it truly does feel like i will never write anything good ever again rn so i would like to prove myself wrong next year.