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Oh, speaking of the medical appointment: my new doctor also upgraded my diagnosis from "intermittent asthma exacerbation" to "asthma, poorly controlled" which is at least somewhat validating. Ugh, though—it feels like the Tim Curry monster in Ferngully has taken up residence in my lungs.

(It's very slightly funny, also, because I was doing so well two months ago that by the time I finally got an appointment with a pulmonologist, she was like "have you ever had respiratory distress? I wouldn't know you were asthmatic from these readings, though your lungs are slightly weaker than I'd expect in someone your age and asthma symptoms can be so variable that it doesn't mean you don't have it." And I had to be like ... lol yes I have nearly died or been reduced to a vegetable many times, and just a few weeks later The Great Collapse happened and I've had the worst asthma experience of my life since high school.)

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reblog game put in the tags how you found prev

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IT FUCKIN YURI DAAAAAAAAAAAY

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refugee fam beach day feat. elwing and elros :)

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sometimes it’s annoying when your character can’t jump in a video game but how often do you jump in real life?

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jkadf;jkajdfj I was talking with my beloved Trekkie bff J in our kitchen about a discussion I'd seen of whether Pine!Kirk or Shatner!Kirk has more bisexual energy.

J: Hmm. I see it in both, but—

Ash [our other housemate who has seen maybe five episodes of TOS tops and one TOS film, from the adjacent bathroom in which she was showering]: SHATNER!!!!!

me and J: *look at each other, trying not to laugh*

J: I love Pine as an actor, but ... she's not wrong

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I got my doctor's appointment and prescriptions (the doctor decided the best solution to my asthma misery was to nuke it from orbit with steroids lmao) and also wrote some more of the femslash K/S AU for WIP Wednesday!

This section is set quite late in the fic, a few months after the five-year mission, and more than usually spoilery (though no great surprises for K/S fans), so the excerpt and more detailed context are below the cut. However, this phase of the story is essentially a follow-up to the cut lines from "The City on the Edge of Forever" about Kirk recuperating on Vulcan.

Basically, after the string of horrors Jess goes through in S3 and after, S'paak invites her to take her mandatory leave on Vulcan and, now on better terms with her parents, asks Sarek and Amanda to host them. She explains her logic: "leave" for a Starfleet officer as extremely competent and dedicated as Captain Kirk is likely to be little more than nominal if she's easily accessible on Earth (especially if she's in San Francisco itself), and thus Earth seems ill-suited to recuperation from the strains of the mission, all the more as Captain Kirk is prone to handling the emotional excesses of those around her. On the other hand, if their superiors have to go through Sarek to trouble Kirk, disruptions seem less probable.

Amanda is like, "oh sweetie we'd love to have you and your best friend with us for—several months, you said? That would be wonderful! It's been so long! And yes, I'm sure you'll both find it so much more restful at home than back on Earth. And your father does owe Captain Kirk his life...what's her favorite food?" and Sarek's like "no intelligent being owes their life to another and Kirk did no more than her duty, but S'paak's rationales are sound, and the captain has a reputation for honor and reason; if her temperament inclines her to find greater peace and sanctuary in Shi'Kahr than San Francisco, logic suggests she will make a suitable guest."

And a couple months into the recuperation on Vulcan with the silver birds etc, this happens:

-

Throughout the nearly forty years of her daughter’s life, Amanda had almost never heard S’paak raise her voice. She had been a quiet baby, and took readily to Vulcan disciplines in early childhood. And neither Amanda nor Sarek had witnessed her first pon farr three years earlier.

So when Amanda passed Sarek’s study, where she knew he and S’paak were meeting with several elders for their own purposes, she started violently enough to just about dislodge her hair pins when she heard S’paak shouting.

“No! I do not accept—I won’t let you take—”

Regaining some semblance of composure, Amanda hesitated outside the door, catching the sounds of what sounded unmistakably like a physical struggle. The others within the study didn’t cry out, didn’t say anything audible enough to reach Amanda’s ears, but she would not expect them to; despite S’paak’s youth and strength, Amanda couldn’t imagine her capable of overpowering four other Vulcans. But she also couldn’t imagine what would have angered S’paak to such a degree that she would lose all command of herself in such company. It must be a misunderstanding, somehow.

Amanda certainly had not been invited to whatever Vulcan conclave was occurring within the study, nor received any explanation of its purpose. In general, she preferred not to disrupt Vulcan matters or to interfere in Sarek’s and S’paak’s relationship, however strong or disastrously estranged it might be at any given time. But after a few seconds’ consideration, she decided that she couldn’t leave S’paak there, alone with Sarek and the elders and openly upset, without knowing what could have possibly caused it. 

She reached a hand towards the door—but before she could push it forwards, Sarek himself opened it from the other side, his figure blocking Amanda’s attempts to see S’paak. He closed the door behind him before she could peer around him. His face showed no more emotion than usual, but Amanda thought she detected lines of physical weariness.

“Sarek, what’s wrong?” she demanded. “Is S’paak—”

“Plak tow,” he said succinctly, glancing down the hall, as if searching for some change to its usual state. Nothing had changed, not outside the study, not even the placement of the ancient stone vases.

Amanda’s eyes widened. “Plak tow? But pon farr is only every seven years, isn’t it? It’s only been three—”

He just looked at her.

“I thought there’d be more time,” Amanda said, flushing. “Time enough to arrange a different betrothal, at the least. She’ll still die without a bond mate?”

Her voice trembled, but she didn’t cry, which she supposed was an achievement of sorts. Forty years on Vulcan at war with every instinct in her red-blooded veins.

“Yes,” he said. “She was already showing traces of the irrationality that mark the early plak tow, and we had hoped that assuring her of an arrangement to save her life would calm her. The opposite occurred. She turned angry and violent.”

“At the idea of being bonded again?” Amanda said, puzzled. “But she has to!”

“Indeed,” he said, his voice even more neutral than usual. He glanced around again. “Where is Captain Kirk?”

“What?” She could hear S’paak’s voice rise sharply again, though not the words. “What does that—is S’paak safe?”

Sarek raised an eyebrow, looking particularly intractable. He’d always had a remarkable ability to convey an impression of fraying patience without enduring the shame of actually losing his composure. Amanda sighed and relented.

“I’d imagine Jessica is in her room,” she said. “We talked a few hours ago. She’d had a bad migraine and I gave her some human medication for it so she could try to get some sleep. Should I keep her away when she wakes up? She might make the situation more difficult—she cares for S’paak, of course, but…”

Sarek, without saying anything or moving more than a few facial muscles, seemed satisfied.

“No,” he said. “Amanda, go wake her now and bring her here to us. I must remain with Elder Stavak to ensure appropriate arrangements are made.”

Amanda blinked.

“Kirk is the person most familiar with S’paak, and thus more likely to successfully communicate with her in her current state,” he added, which was more explanation than she had expected, if still rather puzzling. After an almost absent-minded ozh’esta, he turned back to the study, then glanced over his shoulder. “Hurry, but be discreet. S’paak may not be capable of shame in this moment, but she will register it later.”

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Holy shit, OP, you weren't joking about the trashfire of the notes.

(Spones discourse would be 1000x less annoying if the shippers who feel the need to incessantly spread the good news of McCoy on Spock posts stopped pretending there's nothing significant or topical about the older white Southern guy major character being the main vector for the racism Spock experiences as a biracial person in the unsubtle social commentary show from 1966. It would certainly help if they'd stop denying it and/or blaming Spock for it on Spirk posts. Challenge level: impossible apparently.)

genuinely one of the best spirk (or mcspirk) moments and kirk isn’t even there

the whole interaction is literally

Bones (being mean to Spock as usual): hey man you don’t have feelings

Spock (offended): dude you know i have feelings

Bones (but now he feels bad for being mean): *immediately knows he’s taking about his feelings for Jim

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I was thinking again about the divide between the tactical seduction Kirk romances and the genuinely romantic unforced ones, and something that's been percolating through my head for awhile is the question of power.

So, the tactical Kirkmances are all responses, at some level, to power being taken from him or someone else or both, and are part of attempts to gather information, escape, and/or protect other people, whatever. But "no" is not realistically an option, whether because he's trapped or imprisoned or desperately needs some information or is under duress in some other form (sometimes the woman in question is also under duress, like Shahna or Drusilla, though most often not).

Because of that, and because of multiple cases where it's made explicit that he doesn't feel any interest in the woman in question and is willing to just lie/deceive to succeed and smooth things over afterwards, we often have no way to know what he really feels in these varyingly coercive circumstances. In most cases, whether he's actually into the woman or not is so irrelevant to him as far as his outwards behavior goes that we have a much clearer idea of the desperation of the situation, his primary agenda, and what other people would be most comfortable with him feeling than what he himself does.

So, for instance, Deela in "Wink of an Eye" enjoys seeing him struggle against her, whether it's through seduction, trickery, physically pushing her away etc, but also wants him to be actually attracted to her and ultimately willing to live out his entire life in the next few months as her, uh, sex toy/breeding stock before dying. Kirk's feelings about all this end up being messy and complicated in a believable way, but essentially culminate in "anyway fuck off forever and die."

There are multiple scenes in "The Conscience of the King" in which we see McCoy desperately wanting to believe that Kirk isn't just using Lenore Karidian, but actually likes her and has real romantic interest in her. McCoy prefers to filter his understanding of Kirk's behavior in the episode through that lens, rather than contending with the horror and injustice that drives Kirk's actions. Spock, whose judgment is continually validated throughout the episode, had already considered the idea of Lenore being a motive and found it unlikely in this case; he guesses that Kirk's real focus is on Anton Karidian and he's just using Lenore to get at him, an assumption that leads to Spock's discovery of the Tarsus IV genocide and murders of the eyewitnesses. In the final scene, McCoy returns to his insistence that Kirk must have had genuine feelings for Lenore; Kirk ignores him and McCoy takes this as proof that he's right, while Spock stands quietly by.

Even in much worse episodes, it's like ... Shahna in "The Gamesters of Triskelion" wants Kirk's sudden flirtation with her to be real, and is too sheltered and vacuous (/sigh) to connect it to his screaming panic over Uhura that immediately preceded it, or the fact that Shahna is his prison guard. Shahna is made so utterly clueless that she can't be held responsible, while Kirk transparently uses her for information to deal with the oppressive overlords of the episode that have placed Chekov, Uhura, and Kirk in thralldom. In the end, Shahna just blandly accepts his refusal to take her with him, and his hope that someday she'll understand why he had to do what he did.

But in these story lines, whether it seems like he's actually into the woman at some level, or very much not, or (as is overwhelmingly most common) it's ambiguous, Kirk takes the initiative to pursue or flirt with someone because of some loss of power. He's not exactly aggressive in the usual masculine sense (the narrative framing is more dramatically-lit morally-ambiguous noir lady), but he is highly proactive and assertive in these cases, and essentially sets out to initiate and control a romance for a distinctly unromantic agenda of his own.

There is a kind of stage management quality to it, and the cases where he seems most visibly troubled or angry about the whole thing tend to be the ones where he's least able to steer the "relationship" or where someone who puts him in some awful situation to begin with acts like they're the injured party (obvious examples: Deela, Helen Noel, Lenore, Sylvia). But he seems to have a definite preference in these "romances" for asserting some kind of power: being the flirty one, the one doing the pursuing, the one who understands what's happening more clearly, the one ultimately in control of how this is going to go, and the terms on which it will end.

But this is conspicuously different when it's an actual romance that isn't forced by the circumstances. Apart from his demeanor being radically different, something that's struck me about the genuine, unforced Kirk romances is how much this insistent assertion of power, authority, and/or control vanishes when there's no threat.

The first person we know he fell in love with was his girlfriend as a teenager, Ruth. He hasn't seen her since he was 18, when he was a somber first-year cadet at the Academy. Even accounting for 60s casting, his memory of Ruth is pretty evidently that of someone who was older than him, more sophisticated and assured, and further along professionally, in no way under any authority from him. Even his interactions with a replica of her lack that stage management quality of the tactical Kirkmances, and his instinct on seeing her is to just go along with this bizarre situation.

The timeline isn't exactly clear, but some time later, he had a disastrous year-long relationship with Janice Lester. And it is clear that something fundamental to that relationship falling apart was the fact that he had avenues of authority open to him that Janice didn't. Kirk actually agrees with Janice that the glass ceiling is wrong and unfair, he just thinks that Janice taking her frustrations out on him as her partner, and tormenting him while indulging her internalized misogyny, was intolerable. One of Janice's many grievances is that they could have stayed together as his career progressed, and she could have gone to space with him, presumably as a member of his crew, while he was and remains very much "absolutely the fuck not" about that possibility. That decision is reinforced by his very consistent, non-negotiable red line around relationships with any crew members, but seems pretty clearly even more objectionable to him than usual in this case.

Even within "Turnabout Intruder," it seems that Kirk doesn't like having to bring power to bear on Janice, although she has thoroughly violated his agency at that point and it has become very necessary. She's the only ex he's known to have unilaterally broken up with, and he would have preferred to part ways cordially, but that was never going to happen; Janice is strongly implied to be an abuser-turned-stalker who resents him getting away, and filters every violation she commits against him through her sense of eternally persecuted (white) feminine fragility.

She insists a man like Kirk could never be physically assaulted and overpowered by a weak and feeble woman like herself, despite knowing perfectly well it's exactly what happened. She isolates him through medical abuse as well as lying about why he left her to his friends and co-workers. She relentlessly targets anyone who tries to help him—the one mainly punished for Kirk's escape attempt is Spock, after all, not Kirk himself ("Turnabout Intruder" is misogynistic in many ways, but a lot of the discussion of that seems to ignore that it's also pretty obviously dealing with an abuse/stalking situation that, apart from the sci-fi conceits, includes some extremely common traits of female domestic abusers IRL).

Janet Wallace, who parted ways with Kirk some six and a half years before S2, is a very successful scientist, and was already building a career in her field when they were together. Both of them are authority figures in their own careers, but their professional paths had so little to do with each other that it was essentially the reason they broke up. Their lives were too separate, despite what seems to have been a pretty mutually rewarding relationship when both were ambitious 20-somethings, and they mutually agreed to separate rather than one of them dictating terms to the other. Jan does seem to have some kind of kink for older male authorities, though; in "The Deadly Years," her sudden uptick of interest in 34-year-old Kirk as he starts prematurely aging is directly associated with her marriage to a very much older authority in her own field, and Kirk is viscerally uncomfortable with it.

His later girlfriend, Areel Shaw, is a healthier figure, though their relationship and break-up seem roughly similar. Both are highly successful career professionals, they're still very fond of each other and obviously still attracted to each other, and there's no indication of any attempts on either side to assert power or control over the relationship in the past or present. Areel makes a joke about him outranking her, but they're in completely different parts of Starfleet, and throughout the episode, he's obviously much more professionally vulnerable to her than the other way around. She's the one to suggest their goodbye kiss by the turbolift, and she takes the initiative to blow another kiss at him as she leaves, leaving him cheerfully poleaxed for a moment before he returns to his job.

The only other ex we know about it in TOS, as I recall, is the unnamed lab technician mentioned in the pilot, whom Kirk seems to have been oblivious to until Gary Mitchell helped her out. Kirk was an instructor at the Academy at the time (implicitly teaching philosophy to cadets for several years), likely in his mid-twenties from contextual information, and she was the one who pursued him. Kirk did have a serious relationship with her, but he didn't know about Mitchell helping her with the "campaign" to catch his attention in the first place, even though he and the lab technician nearly ended up getting married.

In terms of the unforced romances we actually see in the timeline of the show, there are only a few. The earliest is the sort of mutual courtly pining between him and Janice Rand. In "The Naked Time," Kirk's fantasy of a romance with (the superior) Janice is a fantasy scenario where they're on a beach away from any kind of professional context, and specifically, where he has no captain's insignia. We find out in "Miri" (though it was already obvious) that Janice fully reciprocates his interest and wanted to attract him, though she's very professional and competent in general. It's very obviously doomed as a romance. They might hang on to each other in a crisis, but will never do more or cross that line, though it's allowed by regulation—it's doomed wholly because Kirk's position as captain gets in the way for Kirk. Kirk even vents to Bones about being frustrated at Janice's assignment to him as his personal yeoman because he specifically doesn't want pretty women filling that kind of role around him.

It obviously bothers him especially when the yeoman is Janice because he's infatuated with her, but we also see that discomfort in the notorious backrub scene, when Janice's equally photogenic successor as yeoman dutifully starts trying to help with the strain in his back. Kirk thinks it's Spock massaging his back and that's fine (more than fine lmao), but when Spock makes a point of stepping forwards and Kirk realizes the person touching him must be his pretty yeoman, he's intensely uncomfortable and immediately orders her to stop as he gives Spock a long-suffering look.

In Kirk's grand m/f romance, the one with Edith Keeler, she's very much a socially established figure with a secure, stable position, the one who provides Kirk with a job and a roof over his and Spock's heads. She evidently thinks they're eccentric homeless guys when she finds them and takes them under her wing, and later suspects they're WWI vets, but it is very clear that the security of their situation remains entirely dependent on Edith's good will towards Kirk.

Of course, there are ways in which he knows more than Edith and has an advantage in that respect, but Edith is absolutely calling the shots in general. This is the context in which their romantic walks and hand-holding and dates and stolen kisses in the stairwell etc are happening. One of their big romantic scenes occurs because she finds out about Spock stealing materials and Kirk has to sweet-talk her, and she's like ... well, I guess I could overlook it... if you took me on a date. ;) And he's delighted to be pursued by his landlady that way, let's be real.

Edith running the show at least as much as Kirk is, I think, forms part of the idyllic quality of this romance for him. He's not there when Edith casually refers to him as "my young man," but I suspect he would very much like it, yet he's extremely unlikely to think of her as his girl/young lady/whatever. But overall, it just seems very, very clear that this whole dynamic is vastly more to his tastes than one where he's primarily in control and managing things and making all the major decisions.

That's reinforced over a season later, when we find the increasingly strained, tired Kirk of S3 wistfully longing for some arena of his life in which he's not making all the decisions all the goddamn time. Then he gets amnesia, remembering almost nothing about his previous life except that he had never felt happy or at peace, and he's pretty much informed that he's going to marry a hot priestess. Without the baggage of his actual life/memories/responsibilities, he is entirely content to go along with this and seems happy with her.

I mean, "The Paradise Syndrome" is a bad episode, especially the A-plot, but that aspect of it absolutely does track with the rest of what we see of him.

In the superior S3 episode "The Mark of Gideon," the more ephemeral romance with Odona occurs in a context where he thinks they are completely isolated from all other people and institutions, and neither of them has any particular power over the other. In reality, Odona knows a lot more than he does about what's going on, including that they aren't remotely alone. She's there to steal a blood sample from him and, ideally, to make the idea of remaining on Gideon as a disease blood bag more appealing.

After Kirk and Odona are back on the real Enterprise and she's saved, and both are able to exert the autonomy to decide their futures (Odona set on returning to Gideon, which Kirk doesn't want her to do, and Kirk on returning to commanding the Enterprise and its mission, which Odona doesn't want him to do), he has no particular power over Odona specifically but is very much back in authority. They're still flirty, but it's clearly dialed down to a more courtly, going-nowhere level:

ODONA: How can you bear to look at me after the way I deceived you? KIRK: At least, you owe me the privilege of letting me look at you. ODONA: You are a gentleman, Captain Kirk. KIRK, visibly pleased: Thank you, ma'am.

His last romantic plot is with Rayna in "Requiem for Methuselah," a decidedly mid episode until the absolutely buckwild final scene. It's also probably the weirdest of the romances that aren't obviously tactical. Kirk does meet her in his professional capacity, but it's actually the crew of the Enterprise who need help from Flint, Rayna's guardian (Flint has the resources to cure a terrible disease). Kirk et al. essentially bully Flint into helping them, but Rayna isn't present at that point, and Flint evidently has his own secrets and motives. It's only later that they're allowed to meet Rayna, Flint's highly educated and intelligent, but extremely sheltered, ward. She has never met a man other than Flint before (and for the audience, Flint is very obviously grooming Rayna to be his wife).

So Rayna is not in any way subject to Kirk's authority, although it's the reason he's there, but she's so sheltered that there are definitely ways in which he seems the more proactive of the two of them in this particular romance. But she's also intelligent and curious and actively into him. At first, Flint doesn't want her around them at all, and it's Rayna who insists; Rayna is a bit overwhelmed, but interested in exploring the potential of her romance with Kirk; she starts pushing back against Flint's restrictions, and falls for Kirk in a way she never could with Flint.

Flint basically comes up with delaying tactics that involve throwing Rayna and Kirk together, allowing for the more sentimental, "high romance" type of courtship that Kirk goes for (waltzing, kissing etc). But it turns out that Rayna is a very sophisticated android and oblivious to this fact herself (this Rayna is the latest in a long series of attempts), and Flint finds her interest in Kirk promising as far as Flint's ultimate goal of making her his own immortal wife is concerned. He's essentially keeping Kirk around to encourage Rayna's capability to feel romantic love and sexual attraction in general, like a sort of ... sexy lure??? in hopes that she'll turn those feelings to Flint in time.

The problem is that this is, obviously, super fucked-up towards both Kirk and Rayna (Flint refers to Rayna as his property). Kirk's usual hatred of AI does not extend to an AI who is genuinely a full sentient person, though he has to grapple with the concept for a moment, and this revelation doesn't actually destroy his feelings for her. He insists that a) Rayna is in love with him and he with her, and b) Rayna is clearly a full person, and thus no one's property, and has the right to choose what she wants. In the final scene, the question of power is specifically raised:

FLINT: No man beats me. KIRK: I don't want to beat you. This is no test of power. Rayna belongs to herself and she claims the human right of choice to be as she wills, to do as she wills, to think as she wills.

Rayna's very newly-developed capacity for feeling is torn between her love for Flint as a mentor and father-figure, and her confusing and overwhelming feelings for Kirk, and her desire to avoid hurting either of them. The strain of all these contradictory human feelings and impulses (/sigh) fries her circuits and she self-destructs.

(Spock, who spends most of the episode visibly consumed with jealousy of Rayna, is also sympathetic to her, but his priorities are what they are. McCoy accuses him of being incapable of understanding the love triangle that created this situation, as well as of feeling romantic love in general, in all its agonies and ecstasies, after the exhausted Kirk falls unconscious upon returning to the Enterprise. Spock simply tells McCoy goodnight and once he's gone, mind-melds with Kirk and wipes his rival from Kirk's memory because, uh *looks at hand* he and Kirk are totally normal healthy platonic bros and Spock doesn't experience love.)

But I do think the chasm between the actual Kirk romances and the tactical ones is also very much felt in how Kirk navigates power/control/authority. In seduction, he hangs tightly on to some sense of power and autonomy through his ability to control himself and the situation. In romance, though, it seems like he strongly prefers dynamics where he can (or must) step down from his usual authority and the weight of decisions and responsibility is distributed away from him.

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MANSFIELD PARK

(2007)

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Hmmmm

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happy pride month

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I'm sad that I didn't have the brain power to write anything new for the Rebelcaptain fix-it week prompts, but on the bright side, my ... uhhhh oeuvre of Jyn/Cassian fics does include fics that would fit the prompts if I were writing them now. So in honor of the post-Andor kudos/comments extravaganza I've been a beneficiary of, here are the old fics of mine that best match the week's prompts:

1— How they escape Scarif

I did this one a bunch of times, but the one that is the most about the mechanics of escaping Scarif and how that, too, could go wrong is unquestionably per ardua ad astra, the AU where Jyn, Cassian, and Bodhi escape Scarif in an Imperial shuttle only to get caught in the Death Star's tractor beam.

Wildly, she looked around the shuttle. There had to be something she could do. Some last hope. The mission couldn’t end this way. Cassian said quietly, “Jyn.” “No!” She hated the calm on his face, shattering the mask of pain. Had he never expected to live? A suspicion crept on her, near to certainty: he wasn’t going to live, with or without the Empire. At his side, blood soaked her bandage. Every breath he took whistled and shuddered. She hadn’t even begun to look at whatever he might have done to his legs, under those Imperial trousers. Imperial trousers. Imperial officer’s trousers. Jyn turned to look at the cockpit, knowing what she’d see. A slim man in the uniform of an Imperial pilot. Even part of an Imperial droid. One last chance.

2— How they finally admit their feelings

I actually didn't write the actual declaration that often (partly because of eternal WIP-itis), but more often fics when they have already done so or are cautiously maneuvering around it. However, like a storm in the desert does have it:

I love you, she thought, easy and painless. It wasn’t a revelation, exactly; she’d understood it for a long time. Before the Alderaanian missions, probably before Scarif, however improbably.  What everyone else had seen, it was wrong. But it also wasn’t wrong, and she hadn’t understood that. “You know,” he whispered, one hand cupping her cheek again. “Don’t you?” Jyn brushed his hair from his face, triumph radiating through her at the streaks she’d left over his face, at the heavy gaze reflected back at her. “Yes,” she said. “I know.”

3— How they fare on Hoth

Imagining Jyn/Cassian on Hoth inspired my first RO fic altogether, but my personal favorite of my fics with them there is the words are all escaping, which is entirely about the post-ANH evolution of their relationship. It's set in a longer series, but really all you need to know is that Jyn and Cassian are the only ones who escaped Scarif and they formally got together soon thereafter.

“You also asked me if you were a cyborg,” she said, giving up on the chair and the chilly temperature of their quarters at night. Worse than chilly. Even Jyn got cold on Hoth. After the galaxy’s quickest change of clothes, she grabbed the datapad and one of the blasters she’d discarded with her holster, and climbed into bed. Shivering, Jyn tried to find some opening in the tangled mass of blankets, with no effect until they gave a dramatic twitch and lifted. She crawled under, stowing the blaster under her pillow. Cassian didn’t do that, but he was painfully careless—except about organization—when he felt safe. Jyn never felt safe. Not completely, and certainly not with the Empire combing the galaxy for them. Fine, it didn’t seem like Imperial spies ever managed … anything, given their total failure to find Alliance bases over twenty years, but you could never be sure. And Jyn had good reason to know that Rebels sometimes defected, if very rarely; they just didn’t tend to live long afterwards. (Cassian tried to keep her from those missions, at first. Jyn, whose qualms about murder did not extend to traitors, simply packed as usual and slipped into the ship before he arrived. When he found her in the co-pilot’s chair, he opened his mouth to say something stupid and unnecessary, so Jyn just propped her boots up on the panel—which he hated—and stared at him. They never exchanged a word about it, but after the fourth time, he gave up altogether and Jyn kept her feet on the floor.)

4— How they work together on missions

I'm pretty sure my only real missionfic in the usual sense (aka not ad astra, in which the "mission" is survival and involuntary) is probably also like a storm in the desert, which does have a chapter revolving around Jyn and Cassian's nesting dolls of Fake Dating:

Zara, at any rate, was the sort of narrowly good-natured woman who disliked death and suffering, but talked vaguely about the rule of law and dismissed the rest as Rebel propaganda. Major Lannan prided himself on the precision of his conduct while happily remote from actual warfare; he served on a quiet backwater planet that had seen no real change between the Republic and the Empire. Lieutenant Erso and Commander Andor of the Rebellion heartily disliked them both. But the higher officers of Major Lannan’s sector had been summoned to a gathering (otherwise known as a five-day party) with the local brass. Normally, the Rebellion took little interest in such a peaceful region, but the gathering happened to be taking place at Elis Place, which incidentally stored the sector’s personnel records. Draven wanted them for unknowable Draven reasons, so Jyn and Cassian buried themselves into Zara and Lannan and endured. On top of that, the Lannans were, obviously, married. The Alliance operatives stuck inside them were, back in the Rebellion, just as obviously lovers. But packed inside them were Jyn and Cassian, and they were nothing of the kind. Well, maybe something of the kind. But certainly not—not— Jyn opened her eyes in the near-dark, letting her gaze drift down the line of Cassian’s sleeping (maybe sleeping) body. The Lannans’ bed was easily twice the size of their own; where Jyn had considered Cassian’s commander’s quarters palatial, by her standards, these apartments were the real deal. Yet sleeping in this one, a good foot apart, felt more intimate, more dangerous.

5— Follow to the ends of the galaxy

Since I've never written them on Endor, I contemplated the alternative prompt, and I'm pretty sure the closest for me is the final chapter of my f!Cassian/Jyn AU, whatever we deny or embrace:

“Baze said we were practically married already,” she replied, readily enough. “He didn’t know he was saying it, but still. And I thought that—it’d be good to have things clear.” Cassia looked particularly inscrutable. “To me?” “To everyone,” said Jyn. “No misunderstandings.” Again, Cassia’s eyes widened. Her grip loosened, and Jyn had no idea what that was supposed to mean. “You want,” Cassia began, then broke off. “You’re proposing that we swear to … to this, to staying together forever, because now we’ll probably live long enough for it to matter?” She could be very concise sometimes, without sacrificing meaning. It was one of Jyn’s favorite things about her. “Yes,” said Jyn. “And because you want us sworn before the entire galaxy?” she pressed. “Yes.” Cassia released Jyn’s hands, which for one terrible moment, threw all of her conclusions into doubt. Then Cassia stepped even nearer than they already stood, almost as near as they could get, and cupped Jyn’s cheek with one hand, the other dropping to her hip. “Jyn,” she said.

6— How they live after the war

I did write one short fic centered around this idea, one wave short of a shipwreck.

They all knew the end of the war would be difficult for Cassian, and none knew it better than K-2SO, in his own estimation. All of them had certain inconvenient adaptations to make, of course, but none possessed quite the same disadvantages as Cassian. After all, the Guardians of the Whills and Bodhi Rook had functioned in civilian status for longer periods of their respective existences than not, and in any case typically served in non-combat capacities; Jyn Erso spent years of her early maturity as a petty thief, with few aspirations beyond the convenience of the moment; K-2SO’s own security systems were not specifically programmed for war, however useful his contributions. But Cassian retained no alternate data. “If you are considering a return to Coruscant,” he informed Jyn—who, by this point, K-2SO classified as a) an occasional threat to his decisions, b) a frequent co-conspirator, and c) generally the organic counterpart to himself—“then the probability of assimilation to human-typical behaviour may be elevated, but—” “We’re not typical,” she said in her abrupt way, “and I’m thinking of something quieter.” With more relief than he cared to articulate, K-2SO said, “I concur.”

7— Free day!

It didn't really fit for any of the other themes, but one of my favorites of my fics is life, like a swinging vine, which is a one-shot following the first year after Scarif.

Everyone knew that Jyn and Cassian were sleeping together. Everyone, even if they couldn’t decide whether he’d seduced her for the cause or she’d seduced him for her mission. Nobody outside their team seemed to consider that they might have fallen into bed because, say, they found each other attractive and likable (they hadn’t, but did people always have to assume the worst?). Meanwhile, in the real galaxy, Jyn’s skin sparked like a bad circuit when their arms or hands brushed; Cassian hid his answering jolt, or—among the small, strange family they’d accumulated—didn’t bother hiding it at all, his eyes wide and his hand unsteady but close. If they felt particularly daring, they would exchange lingering glances and nervous smiles, before discovering an urgent need to analyze Imperial data protection (Jyn, at least, considered it an achievement to stay in the same room). She didn’t feel afraid, and she doubted that Cassian did either; they’d just never had the chance for this, the trust or time for shyness, uncertainty, the thrill of anticipation crackling beneath, for—well, for being young and in love, and a little stupid with it. Everything was so much, after lives of so little; for now, they soaked up touch, and for now, that seemed like enough. 

[anghraine]

Speaking of Mass Effect, I definitely haven't had the brain power for as much creative writing as I wanted to get done last week (I had lots of free time but also asthma problems), or even really watching things I wanted to watch. And also just felt like trash, so I was like... okay, what's something that would at least let me think about something fun, even if I can't write much of it.

Obviously, my happy place is the f/f K/S AU, and there are definitely scenes from all over the timeline looping in my head; my brain is just not with it enough to actually write them beyond a few sentences a day (sometimes as much as a couple of paragraphs, never more). So anyway, I decided to start a Mass Effect game with a Shepard based on either S'paak or Jessica. But then I was too hazy to decide between them and went for a gestalt version:

The basic idea was for a physical appearance halfway between them, with S'paak's basic coloring and general cast of features, but with a bit of Jess's softer face and a lot more of her style: the make-up was very much inspired by Kirk's pink lipstick in "The Menagerie" and his heavy eyeliner in "Court Martial" (I also spent a silly amount of time searching for a mod that would get me Jess's glossy long-hair-with-side-part, but pragmatically pinned back for the job, but in a way that always implies the possibility of it falling out into dramatic dishevelment and/or a bitchy hair flip should the opportunity arise).

I decided her personality would be somewhere between them (they're not all that different when it really comes down to it, after all), which is very doable thanks to the Paragade mod, but her class abilities would be based on S'paak. S'paak's powerful psychic abilities definitely lend themselves to a biotic class (the closest analogue to Vulcans in Mass Effect are pretty clearly the asari), and combined with her physical strength, that obviously suggested Vanguard, which is my favorite class anyway:

Since her class was entirely based on S'paak's abilities, I figured the origin/reputation could be entirely based on Jessica's, so I went for the closest approximations of Kirk's backstory, with Mindoir as the analogue for Tarsus IV and Akuze for the Farragut:

Obviously the settings are socially extremely different despite the long shadow Star Trek casts over virtually all sci-fi of this type (most obviously the hypercapitalism of Mass Effect vs the fully automated space communism future of ST, even if I don't see TOS's as anything like a pure utopia the way later ST tries to pretend it was). But it's still fun to inhabit the Jessica-S'paak Star Trek headspace while flying around in a starship and exploring planets with her friends loyal crew.

[anghraine]

Damn, I'm just realizing it's been exactly a year since this post!

It's technically been a bit over a year since I actually defended my dissertation, and almost exactly a year since my final revision was approved. But it's a good post to use as the anniversary of finally ascending to my preferred gender (Dr!) :D

It didn't make it into the final version, but in honor of actually finishing the damn thing, here's part of a rambling rant in the rough earlier dissertation:

My perspective is similar, in that I think it is important for literary interpretation to be literary, and for literary scholars to remember that most of us are not actually historians (or economists, or psychologists, or so on). While there is valuable knowledge to be gained from other fields, and historical knowledge can be especially illuminating when looking at texts of the eras that I am looking at, at the end of the day, history is not where my true work lies. Literature remains significant beyond its time and beyond its utility as historical documentation when, as art, it speaks to human conditions beyond those of its creation.

Congrats in the doctorate, that's so exciting!!

Thank you!!! It really is, and such a relief after all this time.

[anghraine]

Quick what are you doing RIGHT now (besides scrolling Tumblr)