#it can be so exhausting to navigate fandom when it feels like a minefield of shipping discourse

[tangentmoth]

You’re one of the living; who’s gonna make it tonight?

Zdravstvuyte, fellow Stalkers!  Tangentmoth is back, with another installment of Scorch the Skies, a collection of loosely interconnected fics bridging Clear Sky and Shadow of Chernobyl, from the point of view of the NPCs our protagonists meet along the way.  (Because someone’s got to care about the Some Gremlins of this obscure, underappreciated fandom, and it might as well be me.)

Chapter 1: Sailor Take Warning

Chapter 2: The Bad Death of General Krylov

There’re a lot of unanswered questions in between Clear Sky and Shadow of Chernobyl, and none so engrossing as the complete disappearance of the title characters of Clear Sky themselves.  Which brings us to this week’s Gremlin: Nimble, the Wedge Antilles of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. universe, and one of only two known survivors of the Clear Sky faction.  

(A/N: This turned out to be a much longer fic than I expected it to be, and will thus be released in two parts.)

Chapter 3: Ishmael (Part I)

“And only I am escaped alone to tell thee…

     - Moby Dick (paraphrasing the book of Job)

---------------

He doesn’t know exactly how long he’s been running.  More than a day, is the best he can figure.  There was darkness at one point.  Now it’s light again, for a given value of “light”.  It all blurs together in the storm.

Sometimes there are lulls in the storm, when the downpour lightens and the lightning stops flashing and the thunder quiets for an hour, two, three.  Those are the times when he rests, when he hides among the hummocks and the reeds. The storm is his friend, right now.  The thunder hides the sound of his passage as he slogs through the Swamps, the curtains of rain and wind obscure his movements, the lightning blinds the eyes of his pursuers.  Mutants, mostly.

But not just mutants.  

He avoids the farmsteads and the ruined villages and the tumbledown old Orthodox church, all the places that had once been theirs, or mostly theirs.  He’s dead exhausted and he wants to stop, hole up in one of the old buildings and dry off and fucking sleep, but he can’t afford to take the chance.  They might be waiting in one of the buildings, or all of them.  Better to just keep moving.  He’s got plenty of energy drinks in his pack, two Flashes in the set of lead-lined pouches at his belt, accurate maps on his PDA.  He can run for days.  But which way?

Not east.  Definitely not east.  He knows he could slip past the military outpost’s machine guns and make it to the Cordon, he’s done it half a dozen times running errands for Suslov or Kalancha, it’s how he got his nickname.  He and Vasya had been running that way to begin with, until they’d stumbled on what was left of Suslov.

The circle.  The heads.  

Vasya had freaked out and run.  Hadn’t paid attention, hadn’t noticed the way the rain was warping and spiraling around itself just ahead of him.  No more Vasya.

North.  North to the railroad tracks, then up through Hunter’s Woods.  He could cut over to the Main Road from there…

---------------

Nimble was lost.  Really, really fucking lost.

He’d gotten to the woods okay.  That part had been alright, except for a couple of Snorks.  Thank fuck for Vasya’s SPAS-12.  Way better than his sad old sawed-off.  He’d taken a couple of swipes, nothing serious, and the combat shottie had laid the Snorks out without much of a fuss.  It was worth the injuries just to be away from the Great Swamps.  No more slogging through the marshes, looking over his shoulder, every minute expecting those...freaks to ambush him and put his head on another pike.  When I get to the Cordon, I’ll buy a bottle and toast Vasya’s memory, he’d thought.  I’ll toast all of their memories.  And then sleep.  Sleep for a week.

Except he couldn’t find the Cordon.  He couldn’t find the fucking road.

He had exited the woods to find himself in rocky, scrubby hill country littered with tangled junk and scrap metal.  The Garbage, according to the maps on his PDA, which told him he was south of some old industrial complex and west of the Main Road.  Good.  Great.  Except then he’d tried to climb a hill for a good vantage and his dosimeter started clicking so fast it was screeching. He’d panicked, tripped and gone tumbling ass-over-end down the hillside in his haste to get back down.  A dumbass rookie move if there’d ever been one. The PDA was still up there on that hill somewhere  With the maps.  

I, Nimble had thought, lying dazed in a bush with his right sleeve shredded to the elbow, am fucked.

There was still the sun to navigate by, at least, but the Garbage was slow going overland.  Terrifyingly slow.  If the dosimeter wasn’t going apeshit, it was the anomaly alarm  It felt like he was wasting fifteen minutes worth of nervous bolt-chucking for every fifteen meters he progressed.  The hills were crawling with blind dogs and the occasional boar, and he was running perilously low on shotgun shells.  Pretty soon he’d be reduced to his shitty little Makarov.  He was exhausted, his injuries were hurting like hell, and he was starting to feel sick despite the Fireball he was carrying.  

Worst of all, the sun was starting to set.

It went down as he skirted around a jumbled pile of what looked like construction crane parts.  For a long minute Nimble just stood and watched, unmindful of the constant click of the dosimeter, until there was nothing left of the light but a faint stripe of slightly lighter blue against the junk-strewn western horizon.  He was alone, in this godforsaken irradiated no-man’s-land, with no PDA to navigate with or call for help, too little ammo and no medicine.  At night.

I am fucked.

------------------

“Vnimanie!  Anekdot!”

Wolf grinned to himself, listening to the others tell their campfire stories.  He’d never admit it, but this was one of the things he liked best about life in the Zone.  Not the firefights, not the thrill of picking your way through minefields of anomalies (or sometimes just literal minefields, if you spent most of your time in the Cordon like Wolf did), not the strange and hazardous wonder of the artifacts.  Just a bunch of fellow stalkers gathered together around a fire, drinking, playing music, and telling stories to ward off the night.

Tonight he was camped out at the old scrapyard with Bes, Bes’s crew, and a small gaggle of Cordon rookies.  The Garbage was a radioactive, anomaly-strewn shithole he normally preferred to avoid unless he was just passing through, but his new crop of rookies were another story.  The Big Blowout had blasted artifacts out of seemingly every anomaly south of Rostok, enough of them that they were just scattered over the the hills like so much shrapnel and you didn’t even need a detector to locate them.  Most of them weren’t of much use (or value, for that matter), but of course the newbies all had fucking stars in their eyes and had taken off from the Cordon like a bunch of greenhorn Alaskan prospectors who just heard there was gold in them thar hills. Wolf had followed, not because he particularly wanted to but because most of these kids were going to die without a babysitter.  Hideously.

“...so Pravik and me, we’re searching the bodies and we hear a ‘whoosh’, and you know what we saw?  A bandit spinning in midair!  Must have been trying to get the drop on us, til that whirligig got the drop on him!  Stupid gopnik too drunk to throw a bolt.”

Wolf snorted, passing a bottle of vodka Bes’s way.  Good stuff, too, not that Cossacks rotgut that was a hryvnia a dozen in the Zone.  A working relationship with Sidorovich had its perks.  And Bes was a good man and a good friend, an experienced Stalker who knew this whole area like the back of his hand. 

Bes took a swig, nodded his approval, then shot a skeptical eyebrow at the storytelling rookie.  “Your clothes look mighty clean for someone downwind of a bandit caught in a whirligig,” he pointed out drily.

“See, that’s the best part though!  It never went off all the way, so he just stayed up there spinning around like a flying saucer!  Might even still be up there for all we know!”

That got them all cracking up, Bes included, and Wolf almost missed it--would have missed it, if not for the sixth sense most veterans gained after a while in the Zone: the sound of footsteps on gravel.

“Shut up, all of you!” he barked, raising his hand in a curt ‘quiet!’ motion and hoping the rookies would take the hint.  He got to his feet, rifle at the ready.  Bes and his men followed suit, a bare instant behind Wolf.  Good.

The footsteps grew louder as they approached, and now they could see the flicker of a headlamp coming from the western end of the old vehicle graveyard.  Not a bandit, Wolf didn’t think; a bandit would have either darted behind cover or opened fire by now.  A Loner, then, most likely...but why hadn’t he announced himself?

“You there!” Bes called.  “Who goes there?”

The figure staggered on toward them, finally close enough for Wolf to make out in the beam of his headlamp.  A skinny guy in some kind of camo fatigues--it was impossible to make out the color in this light--and what looked like a retooled military flak vest that had seen much, much better days.  One sleeve was completely shredded, and there was a bloody bandage around his right thigh.  His face was white, his eyes wide and starey.  

“What the hell?” one of the rookies muttered.

“...don’t...don’t shoot….” the intruder croaked  “Don’t shoot, please…”  Then he fell to his knees, vomiting.

“Shit,” Wolf muttered, running up to the man and dropping down onto one knee next to him.  Up close, he could see the guy was no older than most of his rookies, and that he was puking up mostly blood and bile.  Shit, shit, shit.  “Hang on, man,” he grunted.

He lugged the sick Stalker to his feet, slinging an arm around his shoulders and half-dragging, half-carrying him over to one of the bedrolls arranged around the fire.  Drifter, one of the brighter rookies and the one Wolf had pegged as Most Likely to Survive a Year, held out a canteen of purified water and a medkit, but Wolf shook his head.  “Get me one of the better ones out of my pack.  Should be in a yellow box.”  He’d traded for those from the Ecologists up at Lake Yantar, and they were worth every ruble.  “And the pack of antirad syrettes.”

“Waste of meds,” one of Bes’s men grumbled as Drifter tossed him the packages.  “Better to put him out of his misery now.”

“When I want your opinion I’ll ask for it,” Wolf snarled back.  The sick Stalker was retching again, groaning.  Wolf ripped the wrapper off of a pre-loaded antirad syringe, bit the cap off, and jammed the needle into the Stalker’s hip.  The kid yelped, and Wolf figured that for a good sign.  He followed the antirads with a dose of morphine out of the scientists’ medkit, then squatted back on his heels to get a better look while the meds kicked in and the young Stalker got his breath back.

In the firelight, at close inspection, the Stalker looked like 500km of bad road run hard.  There was definitely bullet damage to the vest, which probably meant bruised or broken ribs underneath.  The wound on the right thigh looked like claw slashes from an mutant attack, and the shredded sleeve revealed what was either a badly infected scrape or a nasty beta burn all the way up his forearm--probably both, considering the dirt here.  There wasn’t much left of the man’s pack but the straps, but he was very obviously carrying three or four artifacts in the pouches on his utility belt--one of them a Fireball, judging from the heat Wolf could feel radiating even through the lead lining.  A savvy choice that had probably saved the man’s life here, where you could eat 200 rem just picking the wrong path to walk down.

He set about stripping off the vest and cutting off the old bandages so he could get at the unfortunate Stalker’s injuries, talking to him while he did so in the hopes of keeping him conscious.  “Lucky you didn’t get shot for a bandit, wandering in here in the middle of the night like that,” he chided.  “Fuck, you’re lucky you didn’t get shot by a bandit out here.  Garbage is crawling with the scum.  You got a name, friend?”

“...Nimble,” the Stalker managed, voice slurred and gravelly from the vomiting and the drugs. “...was trying to find the Cordon...come up through the Woods, then down the road...thought...I was safe…but I got lost…lost my PDA, dogs got my pack...thought I was dead, til I saw your fire.”

The Stalker’s clothes were filthy, caked in mud and blood, but there was a patch on his shoulder that caught Wolf’s eye--not the usual black-on-yellow radiation symbol that most Loners wore, though.  Two birds flying over the rising sun, on a sky-blue field.  The writing underneath was half-obscured by mud, but Wolf could read it just the same. Chistoye Nebo.

Clear Sky.

Wolf glanced up at Bes, beckoning him over.  “You came up from the Great Swamps?”

Nimble nodded weakly, eyes glassy.  Bes looked him over, eyes narrowing with suspicion  “Nobody in the Great Swamps but bandits.  Call themselves Renegades, like they’re a legitimate faction.”  He spat to the side.  

Nimble shook his head, crying out as Wolf poured antiseptic solution over the inflamed claw slashes in his thigh.  “Not me...not us.  We were down there too. Clear Sky.   Nobody...ah fuck!....nobody knew...just a few people, the trader at the Cordon, a doctor up in Yantar….”

“He’s telling the truth,” Wolf said  “I’ve seen his folks at the village.  They come in to trade with Sidorovich every now and again, if they manage to make it past the military outpost.  Some kind of armed science unit, eggheads with guns.  What the hell are you doing up here in the Garbage, kid, all by yourself?  This is a bad, bad place to be lost.”

“...came up through the woods...” Nimble slurred.  The drugs were really hitting hard now; he could barely string words together.  “...nobody left down there…..just me...Vasya fell in an anomaly and died….they got everyone else, but I outran them….”

Wolf frowned at that.  “They?  The bandits, the Renegades or whatever?”

Nimble’s eyes slowly closed.  “...not bandits...don’t know who they were….came after the blowout, in the night….burned our place, killed everyone...I saw Trodnik, he was with them, but he wasn’t..he wasn’t him....they killed everyone…”  He trailed off, head lolling to the side.

Wolf finished re-bandaging the young Stalker’s injuries and sat back, still frowning.  He looked over at Bes.  “That make any sense to you?”

Bes shrugged.  “Kid’s rad-sick and doped to the gills.  Who knows what the hell he’s talking about.  What are you going to do with him?”

“Take him back to the village, if he makes it through the night.” And Wolf thought he would make it through the night.  Young and skinny as he was, he was clearly tougher than he looked--tough enough and smart enough to have evaded whatever had befallen his comrades down in the Swamps, to have survived wandering the woods and the Garbage for what must have been days.  Wolf knew experienced stalkers who might not have made it.  He admired Nimble for it.  But he was unsettled by the kid’s story, filtered through delirium though it was.  

I saw Trodnik, he was with them, but he wasn’t...he wasn’t him…

He knew Ivan Trodnik.  He was a Guide, a rare, valuable, and dangerous trade here in the Zone, and he was good at his job.  He’d worked the routes from Cordon all the way up through Rostok and beyond, before moving south to map the Great Swamps.  Wolf had last seen him maybe two or three weeks ago, dressed in blue-and-white fatigues and good armor with the same Clear Sky patch on his shoulder, escorting a big Merc to see Sidorovich.  Clearly he’d joined these people at some point.  Had he betrayed them?  To who?  What had Nimble meant by “he wasn’t him”, or had that just been the delirium talking?  It was bothering him.

Something bad had happened to the Clear Sky faction, that was certain, and Wolf wanted to know what the hell it was.  The Great Swamps weren’t far from the Cordon and the rookie village.  If there was a chance of trouble moving north toward them, Wolf wanted to be ready for it. 

They came in the night...they killed everyone...

He stayed awake, smoking, listening to the groans and shrieks of the Zone and the survivor’s ragged, labored breathing, for the rest of the night.

[bafflinghaze]

Asexuality x Draco/Harry

This is written for the October 2017 Carnival of Aces hosted by @chrysocollatown. The topic is “Asexuality in Fandom”

Caveat: My awareness of the trends in the drarry fandom (through AO3 and tumblr) rises and falls, so I would have missed things. I welcome things to be pointed out to me.

TLDR SUMMARY:

The drarry fandom has a lot of good writing and AO3 tags are amazing in helping to navigate the romance minefield

In general, only authors who are well informed about asexuality include asexuality

the amount of asexuality in drarry fanwork hasn’t changed much over the years

I write ace!drarry mainly because I wanted something different+trope subversion

 ace!Drarry fic rec list

@dictacontrion’s #queer hp tag

Why is an asexual person in a shipping sector of fandom?

I was drawn to the drarry fandom because of a certain trans!Draco drarry fanfic (I previously briefly talked about that here), and stayed because the stories were really good. Even though I don’t personally do romance in my own life, I can still connect with the characters and the majority of their emotions, and how they interact with each other. In general, any disconnect I sometimes feel towards how the relationship between these characters are written are due to Other Reasons, like my personal preference for reading healthy relationships, for example.

A thing to note is that I’m fine with all the romance (and sex) if I’m forewarned about it, which I am in the drarry fandom—from the implicit assumption of a romantic and sexual relationship, and to all the lovely tags and categories on AO3. The lack of tags/forewarning is why I’m always wary of more ‘popular’ media, because I suspect there would be romance, but have no idea when/where/who it would pop up on suddenly.

How is asexuality portrayed in drarry fanworks?

Occasionally, side characters are made asexual (often Charlie Weasley). But overall, unless the fanwork has explicit LGBTQ+ themes, asexuality isn’t portrayed in drarry fanworks. In a twist of fate then, only authors who know well about asexuality and LGBTQ+ include asexuality, and as such, any portrayals of asexuality that do occur are good portrayals.

There are fics with and without sex, there are fics where both characters are ace, and fics where only one character is ace, and there are a number of different relationship styles.

The numbers, however, are stark. I made an almost exhaustive rec list of fics on AO3 with either Draco and/or Harry being asexual. The list has eleven fics, and if you take a look, you can see that there are six different authors (including me), i.e. the same authors write multiple ace fic and/or queer drarry fic.

Furthermore, there has been only a tiny increase in the number of asexual fics of late. The way asexuality is seen and talked about in fandom spaces hasn’t changed or increased since I entered the fandom a few years ago. Gray- and demi-asexual headcanons for Draco and/or Harry are rare, with only one online.

In contrast, some AO3 census data suggest that about 10-20% of M/M readers and writers are on the asexual spectrum. With over 20 thousand completed drarry fics on AO3, asexuality is extremely unrepresented. Perhaps they’re all in the Sherlock or Check, Please! fandom?

Writing ace!drarry and their reception

I have written a number of ace!drarry fic, two with both Harry and Draco being ace, one with just ace Draco. I wrote ace!drarry because:

I wanted to see something different.

I like seeing trope subversions, and writing through an asexual lens made many tropes ripe for subversion (this was the entire premise of my Cake Is Ace fic).

I wanted to explore different relationship structures, and doing it in the framework of Harry/Draco was as good a way to do it as any.

I actually had quite a good reception to the ace fics that I’ve written, and that has been really encouraging. It really drove home that I’m not the only one who would like to read ace fics, and after the response of the first ace fic I wrote, I really started to think about more ace!drarry ideas and wrote two more ace fics, and I have even more ideas now.

The “worst” response were really more like neutral and/or confused responses: some commentators admitted to not understanding how the relationship I portrayed would work [for the commentators].

A future

It would be nice if more drarry writers were aware how large the ace spectrum is, and how many more relationship types and styles and nuances there exist that could be played with within a drarry fic aside from the typical bisexual/gay Harry and gay Draco, and aside from the common heteronormative-styled romance in the fandom. dictacontrion has an entire brilliant tag called #queer hp that is an extremely recommended read.

Because of people like dictacontrion in the fandom, I think the number of queer-steeped fanwork in general is very slowly increasing (fanfic by fanfic). With more unapologetically queer characters and more breaking of gender norms, a natural outcome would be more asexual representation.