writing year in review: 2022

STATS

total number of completed stories: 4 (▼8)
pyrophane [2] (▲1):

nct dream [2] (▲1)

sulfate [2] (▼4):

detective conan [1] (=)
prince of tennis [1] (▼4)

rhodochrosite [0] (▼11)

total wordcount: 17 239

most used tag: ambiguous relationships [3]
most used rating: t [2]
most tagged character: huang renjun [2]

FIC MASTERLIST + COMMENTARY

eye to eye | detective conan, kir & bourbon

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.

Rena is always meeting Bourbon at thresholds.

notes:

• i think this is a really solid fic that achieves what it intended to do, which was #JUSTICE_FOR_KIR, and i'm happy with how it turned out!! i love kir a lot and i really enjoyed doing a deepdive into her interiority and her conceptually hilarious multi-level coworkers without benefits relationship with bourbon. like kir's entire cover and thus life hinges on akai being dead because she killed him, which is the very thing bourbon is devoting his entire life to disproving, so their aims are fundamentally opposed and totally incompatible... and yet they barely seem to know each other, bourbon doesn't even appear to register that his pursuit of akai is directly endangering kir's life, it's like they're operating on adjacent parallel tracks bridged by the people they have in common--vermouth, akai, and in this fic scotch (TO MEEEEEE. scotchkir my beloved tragedy tinhet.....)--and if there's one thing i love it's highrankers ranking highly next to each other without actually interacting.
• also kir is like at ground 0 of the corrosively toxic fallout caused by akam being around each other, which is really funny but also my poor kir... i tweeted this already but akam are like the inverse of the post that's like the guys in this ship may make each other worse but at least being together quarantines them away from inflicting their problems on everyone else. akam are literally totally capable of having nontoxic relationships with others individually but as soon as they're together they become so obsessively violently hyperfocused on each other that everything and everyone around them gets blown up as collateral damage. and kir is first in the firing line 😭 i hope they both send her some nice and expensive flowers and fruit baskets for all the agonies they have put her through.
• anyway i don't really think this fic has any standout lines but overall it's a story of decent quality with just enough thematic cohesion to tie the whole thing together, and there aren't any parts that jump out at me as being lazily or poorly written, and i had fun seeding my fave agendas (i kinda wish i could have snuck a bit more akam in there but it just wasn't directly relevant... but it very much is the driving force behind the entire situation lmao).

best lines:
Navigating the minefield of interacting with another reconnaissance specialist is always a headache, but the first step of any reconnaissance mission is discerning the parameters of the social territory. This litmus test is simple enough to administer: “It’s good to finally meet you. Scotch spoke highly of you.”

• i took care with the word choice here and i'm super happy with the result... and the ghost of scotch was there!!! i think both kir and bourbon loved him (SCOTCHKIR REAL IN MY MIND) but neither of them know the other felt the same way

Signals of attraction were some of the first things Vermouth ever taught her to look for and to imitate. Rena isn’t sure if it’s the performance itself Vermouth enjoys, or the knowledge that it’s a performance.

• verkir sexy recon/honeypot mentorship is sooo important to me i think vermouth specifically does enjoy self sabotage by fixating on + helping out traitors

Light like glass, floor like glass, herself just as brittle and Bourbon facing her like a warped reflection.

• literally the entire thesis of this fic... it's about being the same but not the same... it's about viewing and being viewed... it's about the crushing weight of the many griefs both kir and bourbon are separately secretly bearing...

She dismantles the rose-scented cloud of tissue paper and out into her cupped palm tumble five delicate hairpins. The practical kind, not ornamental, designed for invisible functionality. She lifts one up, pries the halves apart with a thumbnail, testing the tensile strength: surprisingly sturdy. Enough to, say, pick a lock. It pulls a laugh out of her, despite herself. So this is the code of honour that Bourbon operates on. A man who leaves no business unfinished, no matter how trivial.

• idk i really like the rhythm of this paragraph and i think i chose good verbs

late but it was light | prince of tennis, yukimura/niou

The unseen steel of diligence, masked by that deliberate inconstancy. Or: Yukimura tries to pin down a mirage in the garden.

notes:

• this is the final part in my 3byuki series which was originally two unrelated dw fics i decided to collect together when crossposting to ao3, which meant i had to reverse engineer a narrative throughline, which meant i needed to write yukiniou to complete the triangle. this one taking place in the future after the u17 world cup gave me a bit of trouble because i severely hate the actual canon surrounding this particular point in time for rikkai so i didn't want to canon review even though i obviously was just going to ignore the parts i didn't want to acknowledge in my personal version of tenipuri canon.
• ummm anyway yukiniou is my favourite dynamic within 3byuki because it's the most difficult for me to pin down and i think they have a lot of trouble understanding each other even though yukimura really really wants to know niou better and niou is one of yukimura's most loyal followers even if it doesn't seem that way at first. and on top of that they also have to deal with the godzilla of niou knowing that yukimura purposefully let him lose/die at nationals finals but not being able to help forgiving yukimura for it even if he wanted to hold a grudge. like i think niou is the only rikkai member who has a complex about his yukimura complex, everyone else has either consciously accepted it (yanagi, marui), doesn't actually have one (jackal, yagyuu), or simply doesn't even realise that what they feel about yukimura is in complex territory (sanada, kirihara), so the levels of Awareness and resentment that never actually becomes fully-fledged resentment because niou literally cannot hold that kind of feeling towards yukimura make yukiniou So Fucking Complicated... but in the end it is LOVE. terror and incomprehensibility and all.
• i always struggle a lot with yukimura's voicing, i have terminal CannotWriteOnepickitis and i find it really hard to strike the right balance of polite society lady / viewpoint that doesn't quiiite align with a normal human moral outlook / the terrifying yawning chasm of yukimura's feelings about tennis. but i think i did pretty well here and also with yukimura's somewhat unreliable narration in that he thinks he is understanding niou but he seriously isn't. yukimura's main problem when it comes to rikkai is that he has these very strongly held assumptions about everyone, and because they love him so much they do their absolute best to fulfil those assumptions even if it's causing them intense psychological damage, but since those assumptions are not always entirely correct they will ultimately fail to be what yukimura wants from them. that's the tragedy at the heart of rikkai. and even though this is a hopeful fic about Growth and Future i think that's the bittersweet element underlying everything that yukimura doesn't quite clock, but niou maybe does.
• i do like this fic a lot!! i think it's the strongest out of the trilogy on a technical level and represents my views well and has good dialogue and strong atmosphere and includes some lines i'm super proud of, and i think i did a good job of tying the "plot"/things that are actually concretely happening to the metaphorical/narrative aspects of yukiniou's relationship i wanted to explore. probably my favourite thing i wrote this year :')

fave lines:
Yukimura says, “It was probably an error of judgement.”

Stone into still water. It hardly feels like an admission at all, so far away from the brittle brutal delirium of that summer. They’ve already had another summer since, an ocean away, though not the right one. They will never be able to return to the right one. And yet. So much interpolated between then and now there are times Yukimura feels almost unrecognisable. Surely Niou must feel the same, a guess hazarded by that vague awareness at their threshold proximity, even if Yukimura is unable to discern the precise parameters of the difference in him.

“It wasn’t,” Niou says. “It wasn’t an error.”

• this feels like an extremely Me section it makes me very happy to read back over... i think the prose has swag and the dialogue has yolo and the pacing and tone is exactly what i wanted to achieve and i loveee the technique of breaking up a conversation with an introspective paragraph in the middle. i'm not sure what my writing style is or if i even have a style but i think this is a good example of writing that i can recognise as typical of me, like if i had amnesia specifically about my fics and i had to pick my own writing out of a blind lineup

“I’m Rikkaidai’s Niou. It’s built in.”

• i think that more than anyone else niou relies on structures and archetypes and titles to define the world and his sense of identity, even though he's meant to be the unpredictable trickster chameleon, so rikkai is even more synonymous with yukimura in niou's mind than it normally is. niou is yukimura's niou!!!

Three summers in a row, as though they have been preserved in the season of full bloom all this time. At the peak, the only vector of change possible is degradation and therefore something to be avoided at all costs. The wilt, the decay, the inevitable culling. Yukimura staved it off as long as he could and he’d almost managed to believe he had achieved that perfect stasis. But he’d been wrong about that, too. He’s a gardener. He should know this cycle well. You plant the seeds, water them, watch them grow and bloom and wither, and then you start everything all over again.

• 1) summer is theeeee most fucked up season of all time 2) yes i'm constantly writing garden metaphors about yukimura/rikkai but as if it's my fault it is right there in the text

desire path | nct dream, jaemin/renjun + haechan/renjun

Jaemin had thought, Renjun doesn’t look at me like that. But the expectation did not mirror itself into the material world.

notes:

• i already wrote a massive dvd commentary post <here> so i won't go back over all of that but i'm glad i finallyyyy wrote idolverse for nct that properly reflects my current understanding of the meta. i love jaemdongren... i hate writing explicit fic so i will always feel negatively about the actual porn but i think the rest of it is a good jokes/terror balance and thematically tight and i also think this fic has the largest quantity of Good Prose both in absolute value terms and ratio of normal writing to writing i would consider special/pretty so i would say that this fic is probably 👍 overall.

fave lines:
Reams of sunlight falling down around them like rain. The kind of brightness that led to overexposure, everything washed out into indistinct shapes that if you squinted might resemble something you knew.

• 1800 i love writing light imagery...

“Renjun wants us both to be there,” Donghyuck clarifies.

"So why are we having this conversation without Renjun?” Not that Jaemin wants to have this conversation with Renjun.

“You don’t want to have this conversation with Renjun.”

“I might,” Jaemin says, frowning. “You don’t know that I don’t.”

“Liar,” Donghyuck says gleefully. “Like you care what Renjun has to say.”

“You don’t know anything about me and Renjun.”

“And neither do you. That’s literally your whole problem.”

• sorry to c/p in this huge chunk but this conversation is really funny to me i love contrarian jaemin

The first time Jaemin kissed Renjun it had been nearly too dark to see his face. Only a soft and muted glow leaching in from the lit-up hallway outside, the bedroom door cracked open just a sliver. Time felt suspended, like they were ensconced in the space of a held breath. The gentle and cautious movement of Renjun’s mouth against his as the seconds slowed to standstill, and then Renjun tipped his head onto Jaemin’s shoulder and refused to look at him no matter how many times Jaemin said increasingly ridiculous variations of his name in increasingly ridiculous voices. When Jaemin finally coaxed Renjun’s head back up with a hand to his chin he glimpsed, for a moment, his own reflection in the irises of Renjun’s eyes. Haloed in the embarrassment of hope shining out of Renjun. Jaemin could almost believe it himself.

Before Renjun leaned in he’d been wearing an expression of uncertain and careful concentration, partway to a frown. Like he was looking for something in Jaemin’s face. He must have found it, because he’d kissed Jaemin back.

• reading back over this made me bite lemons and die a bit from AGHHHH MY SHIP COULD HAVE BEEN REAL so i think it also warrants a multi paragraph c/p... this is the default image i have of jmrn in my mind, the two of them in a dark and quiet room where they can't see each other's faces, everyone is holding their breath, everything is very delicately paused so even though the contact is temporary in the moment it feels like it could last forever. i also think this section is a good representation of my """style""" insofar as it exists

An inventory of presences and absences. The three of them in the room, the four of them out of it. The uncomfortable silver stripe of his ring, the identical one banding Renjun’s finger and Donghyuck’s. And Jaemin’s hand braceleting Renjun’s bare wrists, proxy for an old gift.

• i think this part is nice

Jaemin understands materiality because material objects don’t change. The intangible process by which they accrue or lose sentiment might be beyond his comprehension, but there is still a silver bracelet in his drawer whose gold twin is somewhere that lacks specificity but not, strictly speaking, definition.

• i also think this part is nice

Donghyuck snorts, an incredulous sound, but Jaemin isn’t looking at him. The line of Renjun’s mouth trembles, and then it firms. Purposeful. The faith hasn’t run out just yet.

• surely it is a privilege to approach the end still believing in something!!!

the time i'm seeing you | nct dream, mark/renjun

From the threshold, the superhero known to the public as Protagonist, and to his friends and also enemies as Mark Lee, blinks at Renjun. What’s another insane stroke of coincidence for the night? But of course probability always warps around Mark anyway.

notes:

• literally just a silly meaningless storyless cute jokes fic but iiiiiii enjoyed myself :) i started this halfway through last year as a brief writing exercise to get past writer's block and indulge in one of my favourite tropes WOUND CARE which i literally haven't written since..... 2019? except i ended up getting severely blocked on this and approx 800 words in i decided i actually wanted to write jaemren emotional anguish porn instead of markren dorohedoro style gory romcom. so i cannibalised the fic premise into waiting for you to move on and made everything 500% more depressing. and then this year markren quiet down glass box simulated sex reignited my desire to create markren content so i dusted this wip off again... but as the slowest writer in the world it still took me another 4 months to finish lol.
• i was especially struggling with the lighthearted tone + ending it's really out of my comfort zone... it does kill me a bit to write straight up romance without some kind of antipathy or anguish in the mix i find it soooo randomly embarrassing like yo look at this loser writing unabashedly about LOVE -_- but i got over it with the power of michsprints! i think i am still too close to this fic to tell if it's good or bad but i do think it's pretty funny, i had to cut some of the jokes because i wasn't sure they were in character but i was definitely prioritising comedy over like... accuracy and quality. but i also think jokes are the most important thing in the universe so like on god i hope this fic is funny to other people and not just myself.
• i don't even think i like superheroes/supervillains that much, i'm most interested in the POWERS part but i Fucking Love bureaucracy and administration and institutions so i keep finding myself writing about professional superpower users lmao. anyway can you believe it's taken me four years to finally finish a fic for my second favourite nct ship........ my gdocs is a veritable graveyard of abandoned markren wips *pained smile* i have had my ups and downs with markren over the past year or so but the return to my preferred mark<-ren dynamic during candy promos feels so fortuitous :') it's all coming up MARKREN... except for the part where i literally could not stop bringing up jaemin. you can't blame me for being jaemin no onna though.

fave lines:

He’s read the field reports from other agents—done the recon work himself, even, tacked up the blown-up photographs and satellite imaging printouts onto the main meeting room’s serial killer corkboard, which had accrued the moniker thanks to Donghyuck staunchly refusing to call it anything else despite Renjun’s best efforts at arguing that being a serial killer was really a specific status separate from killing serially, and Renjun was willing to concede the latter but not the former. Jaemin, who never met a debate he didn’t find hysterically funny to play both sides, professed the stance that even if that were true, they all possessed both attributes anyway, so the distinction had no practical effect.

See, even Nana agrees with me, Donghyuck said smugly, to which Jaemin turned his most breathtakingly charming Top 10 Supervillains Too Sexy To Be Terrorists! photo op smile on Donghyuck and said, Don’t ever call me that again, and Renjun frowned and said, But we really aren’t serial killers, though. And we’re not going to kill Protagonist. Serially or otherwise.

• this conversation is really funny to me (guy who loves laughing at their own jokes) and i do think it's the kind of stupid debate evil dream would get into heated arguments over and also ndr of light(?) with the jokes/terror meter firmly tuned to the jokes end makes me smile in contrast to the ndr of dark in my last fic... i kinda love bitchy supervillain coworker classmates trio ndr i feel like i keep writing them like this

“What about your,” Mark visibly struggles to think of an appropriate descriptor, “... henchman?”

• henchman jokes are so funny to me personally and the idea of jaemin in particular being a henchman is even funnier, though i think jaemin would make a great starscream like he just needs to decide to commit to the bit

DREAMWIDTH MASTERLIST

• sylvix crimson flower route paired ending - abandoned wip post
• rating all of the night world novels
• adventure (singular) in music arrangement - my piano arrangement of color by fuji syusuke & hirakoba rin
• love isn't a word - favourite quotes with the word 'love' in them
• skincare routine update again
• thoughts on gundam seed
• i love you miss mystery 🎶🎵 - top 10 detective conan ops/eds
• i love scents and smells - my favourite perfumes
• who said triangles had to be stable - discussing my favourite dream 3ps and triangulations
• fave jokes tennis songs
• fave terror tennis songs
• fmv (fuck my vlife) - collection of my favourite fmvs
• tropes are so good tho - favourite examples of my favourite fic tropes
• desire path commentary
• you will become a swallowtail butterfly - summary of my fave scenes in turn a gundam
• ranking char clones by handsomeness
• skincare routine update reup the reloaded
• randomly heart touching quotes from my legal philosophy class readings
• i could fix him (yugioh arc v) - rewriting the plot of my favourite and least favourite anime of all time yugioh arc v in an attempt to make it maybe not the worst story ever told in the history of humanity
• and the lake was frozen in a lightning flash - gundam witch from mercury playlist for my otp 4sule
• that guy, he is a JAEMIN - powerscaling various fictional jaemin clones
• books i read in 2022
• buying beauty products is my passion - review of various recently-trialled beauty products
• cc archive (ongoing)

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 because i didn't expect to write any of the fics i wrote this year but less because i failed once again to finish dreampuri. i think 17k might be my lowest cumulative yearly wordcount since i started writing fic in like 2014 or something but on the upside i think the average quality of everything i wrote this year is ok! i don't hate any of my 2022 fics which is maybe a first for me but we'll see how i feel about the time i'm seeing you in a couple months when i've developed an opinion on it lmao.

what pairing/genre/fandom did you write that you would never have predicted in January?
i guess my New Fandom Of The Year was the gundam franchise even though technically i started getting into gundam in late december 2021 but i have no evidence of this as i never finished any fic lol. i have a handful of lines of 4sule fic in a sticky note and like 1/3 of a sayla character study (AND THREE GUNPLA!) but everything i actually posted was just Things I Already Like... genfic focusing on minor female character✅ complicated somewhat tense ambiguous relationships canon compliant pickshipping✅✅ superpowers✅

did you take any writing risks this year? what did you learn from them?
no.... maybe the writing risk i took was literally just writing fic at all during my final year of uni lmao. that makes me feel better about how little i wrote but considering i'm going to be even busier next year idk how that bodes for my writing career going forward </3

best story of the year?
late but it was light, i just think it's the strongest overall in terms of prose and pacing and characterisation and thematic coherence and representing my views... i think it's a good fic!!

most fun story to write:
actually it's my 82 wip that i'm working on rn but other than that maybe eye to eye? which also has ridiculously self-indulgent background agenda seeding, i think nothing makes me happier than writing in background shippy subtext and/or crossover cameos unrelated to the main point of the fic. but also actually the text i had the MOST fun writing was my jaeminclone powerscaling dw post <3 i love jokes <3

hardest story to write:
desire path for the reasons of porn (hardest thing in the universe to write fr) + gift for beloved friend + sequel/remix for a fic that i consider sacred text + favourite ship/s so obviously i really wanted to write something that was Actually Good and represented my views properly and wasn't lazily rushed to the finish line in the way my fics usually are because i'm sick of writing them and want to post them asap and ofc that niz would like, so i was under a considerable amount of self-imposed pressure that i think and hope paid off...

favourite opening lines:
i am not one of god's opening lines writers but i think i'm getting better at embracing the philosophy that an opening line is just a line that isn't the opening that is the opening. from desire path:

“So we were thinking,” Donghyuck says, offhand, as he drops into the seat beside Jaemin, even though there is plenty of unoccupied furniture real estate on the other side of the table where Jaemin would not be required to acknowledge his presence. There are only four out of seven of them present, which is actually quite the impressive ratio these days; meals involving more than half of them are a rarity, now that they’ve largely dispersed out of the Dream dorms.

favourite ending lines:
ok it must be said this was kind of a flop year for ending lines for me which is a little bit depressing since killer ending lines is something i usually pride myself on in my writing so it's like how are you not even good at the thing you are supposed to be good at. ANYWAY from late but it was light:

“So make sure you come back to us soon,” Yukimura says. “I’ll be waiting.”

And Niou smiles, that classically sly and opaque tilt to his mouth that could mean truth or mockery or both in the way only Niou can manage. “For you?” he says. “Anything.”

writing goals:
this year's goals:

• finish dreampuri ❌
• write itzy or aespa fic ❌
• academy era hagimatsufuru 3p ❌ (but i did write a different detective conan fic!)
• write something good that doesn't make me feel disappointed in myself ✔️

um............. my track record does not look good but arguably i achieved the most important goal, maybe quality over quantity is real...

next year's goals:

• finish dreampuri 😭🙏
• write more akam!! i still have a rye/bourbon a/b/o pwp without porn wip from last year but i'm not really feeling her, i kiinda want to write akai/bourbon in the handful of years after akai's cover got blown but before the start of canon, but obviously if i were writing akam it would have to be porn otherwise it's a waste of their crazy chemistry and i don't know if i have it in me to write any more explicit fic. i hope the fujobait critical mass in next year's detective conan movie since akai and amuro are both going to be in it will kick me into gear
• refine my style, i think my writing has become a lot more boring and plain and dry recently and i feel a little bit sad reading back over my fic from like 2016 which was worse story-wise, sure, but my prose was so much more interesting and creative back then. i've been working mostly on improving my dialogue skills these past few years and while i think i've gotten a lot better on that front i feel like it's come at the cost of being able to write beautiful descriptive and introspective passages that Convey Emotion and i want that ability back!! like i truly think my writing is so clinical (comparatively) these days idk... some of it is down to pov choice but i'm pretty sure i used to be able to do emotional intensity with pov characters with outwardly controlled images... i think i forgot how to feel emotions myself. maybe i need to rephrase this goal as Re-Remember How To Have "Feelings"
• i think i need to drastically lower my goals i'm honestly not even sure i will have enough spare time to write even one fic next year since i'm starting full time work with really long hours so i will legitimately be happy if i can just manage to do that. one thing about me is that i will never have a consistent output :''''')

CURRENT WIPS

any way we are (aka dreampuri) | nct dream, jaemin/renjun, 10.3k/15k

“Your concealer’s melting off,” Jaemin says. “I can see the moles on your neck.”

Donghyuck swears and shoves his hand into the outer pocket of Renjun's sports bag, fishing out a slim tube and a phone. Squinting at his reflection in the phone screen, he unscrews the top of the concealer and dabs at his neck with the applicator. “You know, Renjun usually does this bit for me,” Donghyuck says, closing the tube and tossing it back into the bag. He pats the pigment into his skin with the pad of his index finger. “You could make yourself more useful.”

“You have a perfectly good reflective surface right there,” Jaemin says.

“Come on, Jaemin, play along a little,” Donghyuck says, heaving a gusty sigh. “It won’t kill you.”

2023 is the year i WILL finish this fic i swear to god!!!! i made several important narrative and metaphor breakthroughs this year i just need to ummm.... fill in the rest of the story. haha.


like shadows in a stranger's dream | aespa, winter/ningning/karina, 1.7k/3k

Aeri flicks a tiny shard of light at Yizhuo. It bursts apart when it hits her skin, fizzing into the air with a gentle tickling sensation. "Hey!" Yizhuo protests. “Don’t attack me!”

“I’m not attacking you, I’m literally giving you free LED light therapy,” Aeri says. “People pay a lot of money for this, you know. I can do different colours and everything.”

Yizhuo laughs. “Is that your new business model?”

“Totally. I’m offering a murder-plus-spa-day combo. It’s my special self care package, like, getting rid of the stress in your life at every level.”

this excerpt is completely unrepresentative of the rest of the fic which is about winningrina contract supervillains triangulation tension but it's kind of the only readable part so far sooooo jokes time with giselle it is. it's set in the same universe as waiting for you to move on because i love reusing worldbuilding and i'm kind of obsessed with this au now. i hope aespa's new reality show will give me enough info and confidence about understanding their characters to finish writing this fic in 2023!!!


to perfectly perform in reverse | prince of tennis, yagyuu/niou, 4.2k/5k

Yukimura is unreadable to Niou because she is so fundamentally different from her 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.

this is an extremely self indulgent sequel to my nyota 3b futurefic from 2 years ago, it's technically about 82 reuniting at kirian's wedding but actually about parading niou through a series of highranker interactions including nct dream for my personal edification. it's almost done, i was hoping to finish it before the new year but i've just been too busy :') i expect i should be able to finish in jan 2023 though!!


if at the end of everything there is | gundam, sayla-centric, 0.8k/2k

She has not become a good woman like her brother hoped, but she can live with that. She is, after all, still living.

She does not return to medicine. She does not trust herself not to cut away more than is strictly necessary to heal.
//
In her mind’s eye her brother is always leaving and she is always reaching for him, pleading for him to stay, and this time he isn’t yielding to her like he used to. Again and again the pattern repeats itself. When she’d seen the Zaku for the first time, red and backlit from fire, and her legs gave out beneath her before she even registered the sight, her body understanding before her mind. In the sandstorm with her face bare and his still masked. Amidst the debris of A Baoa Qu when he’d held her and told her to become a good woman and she’d thought, flash of terror or precognition, this is the last time we will ever—

futurefic character study about sayla and her life on earth after the 1 year war and her career track shift from medicine to finance, you guys know i love a business major and sayla is already my universal century onepick. the main things i wanted to cover were 1) charsayla falling out of love 2) the thought process that led to sayla deciding to leave medicine for finance which is kind of a hysterically drastic slide from one end of the spectrum of ethical behaviour to the other 3) sayla justifying killing enemy soldiers / killing char specifically during the war as medically necessary 4) christina/sayla my leomercuryshipping rarepair tinhat yuri. anyway idk if i'll finish this but i'm kinda just playing around with melodramatic imagery and having fun because melodrama is my favourite wheelhouse <3