#[bananaleaves fic tag]

[bananaleaves]

and many graces. the hunger games, m, peeta/katniss. (1 / 3)

The love is too big for either of them to swallow, and it devours them both. The love survives, or they do.

What Peeta holds onto when he loses everything else, and what he finds after. (Or: Peeta hijacked, Peeta rescued, Peeta recovered.)

[lissomelle]

First Lines Fic Meme

Tagged in a first-lines-of-fic meme by the diabolical (and wonderful) @hmsharmony​!

Rules: share the first lines of ten of your most recent fanfics and tag however many people you like. If you have written fewer than ten, don’t be shy and share anyway!

Tagging: @morewonders​, @theopensea​, @spurlunk​, @bananaleaves, any other writers who want to do this 😘

There’s going to be a lot of WIPs here, lol — additional asterisk that anything unpublished is not set in stone. I have more in the drafts, but this is more than enough. (Telling myself I’m allowed to post because I’m actively working on most of these!!)

* * *

1. untitled post-s2 fic — in-progress | Shadow & Bone (TV), Nikolai/Zoya/Alina/Mal + permutations

The shadow demon wakes him in the dead of night on the palace rooftop.

Or the edge of it, as it were. Shivering, palms smarting and feet bare against the crushed tiles as the wind tears at his thin shirt and trousers, Nikolai employs his years on the sea to swear profoundly.

Sleepwalking. Again.

*

2. untitled canon divergence AU fic — in-progress | Shadow & Bone (TV), Alina/Mal

The first thing Alina learns in Ketterdam is that the Crows are proper criminals.

When Kaz isn’t dispensing alarming advice (“Preferable when the blood on your hands isn’t your own”); Inej isn’t sharing leads on honest work; and Jesper’s not eyeing a conquest, losing money, and recommending pleasure and leisure establishments like mayor of the city all at once — they’re a sleek, secretive unit. A deadly one, if the rumors are true. Their discretion doesn’t slip so much as deliberately lower when it might benefit to leave a fingerprint. A warning that they were there.

They know the city better than anyone, but more importantly, the city increasingly knows them.

*

3. untitled post-canon fic — in-progress | Moon Knight (TV), Marc/Layla/Steven

Despite everything, two constants remain in Layla’s life:

One, Marc still disappears.

Two, most times, Steven’s there instead.

She doesn’t know how this works. Being good at math never prepared her for having half a husband or two husbands or just many, many shards of a man. Fractions don’t explain the way Marc and Steven will flow into each other now, quicksilver fast, just as they don’t explain why or when one will stay while the other leaves.

*

4. untitled canon divergence AU fic — in-progress | Knives Out, Marta/Ransom

What’ll you do when I’m gone?

Marta had her fingers at his wrist, counting beats to measure his pulse. That’s not for a long time, Harlan. God willing.

You need an adventure. Go now, send me postcards and pictures. Crack open the bone and suck the marrow out of life!

You wouldn’t last a day.

*

5. untitled canon divergence AU fic — in-progress | King of Scars, Zoya/Nikolai

In their record-breaking run of poor ideas, Zoya thinks, this has to be the worst.

Lying side by side, the space between them feels narrower by the moment.

“I would make you my queen because I want you.” In the dark of the cargo hold, Zoya can’t be sure of Nikolai’s expression but his words sound certain. “I want you all the time.”

*

6. sanctity of our own devising (Mature) | King of Scars, Zoya/Nikolai

Sainthood is its own kind of death.

In the long, slanted hand of history, she is already being worn smooth, iconified yet also erased. Names rise and fall like snow in Ravka. Pure, cleansed by the storms that wrought them. Such is the way of Saints, bodies and humanity alike spent in the making of sanctity. Only one lives to rule a nation, scholars have begun to write.

Daughter of the Wind. Dragon Queen. Herald of a new age.

*

7. Null and Void (Teen) | To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, Lara Jean/Peter

The first note is easy.

Just the bottom of a clean sheet ripped out of his notebook and folded twice. Peter doesn’t even think before adding the heart and writing her name outside.

We’re gonna crush this, Covey. Trust.

*

8. rhythms of unseen drums (Teen) | Black Panther, Nakia/T’Challa

When the world first spoke to Nakia, it chose to murmur.

She discovered early her aptitude for language, her mouth deftly forming words to fit their native shapes. Her teachers encouraged it, offered tomes and music from every country, which she drank up in greedy gulps until she could quote lines by Murakami and sing bars of Edith Piaf with equal ease.

The idea to leave home stayed buried, setting down spindly roots but never peeking above the soil. She thought and then quashed the idea of becoming a translator in the capital city one day; Wakanda’s borders were not hers to open.

*

9. timbers we place by hand (Teen) | The Punisher, Frank/Karen

The front door won’t shut.

Less than a year of living in a doorman building, and the auto-lock for the entrance is useless because the goddamn door won’t shut all the way. Karen tries coaxing it into place, nudging and wriggling the doorjamb. No good. Sighing, she’s got the number for the front desk pulled up on her phone when the thought appears, unbidden, that this might have been the point. To catch her on the stoop, distracted.

She looks up sharply, sweeping her gaze from left to right and sliding a hand into her bag.

*

10. The Hollows of Shells (Explicit) | The Scorpio Races, Puck/Sean

To no one’s surprise, Sean Kendrick steps across the threshold of the Connollys’ house so many times it isn’t long before he arrives to an extra place already set at the table and a worn groove in the ancient, battered sofa that fits around him.

Today, however, he stands on the front step, shifting from foot to foot. He has a strong urge to knock on the door even though it’s been months since Puck made an impatient noise and told him he could simply walk in. It feels like an old contract rendered null, the new terms uncertain now that he’s arrived with everything he owns in hand — scant though it is.

[bananaleaves]

and many graces. the hunger games, m, peeta/katniss. (2 / 3). 18k.

On screen, a dead version of him kisses Katniss on the forehead, looking at her with such gentleness that he can almost feel it in his chest. “We tried to take care of each other,” he says, softly. “Sometimes.” “Sometimes,” Haymitch echoes. “When you weren’t trying to kill each other.”

What Peeta holds onto when he loses everything else, and what he finds after. (Or: Peeta hijacked, Peeta rescued, Peeta recovered.)

[bananaleaves]

and many graces. the hunger games, m, peeta/katniss. (3 / 3). 26k.

She leans up on her tiptoes and kisses him again, kisses him hard, her mouth urging his open. He pulls away. “Katniss, stop,” he says. “Stop trying to convince me of something.” Something in her face hardens and shutters, locking away somewhere he can’t reach. “What the fuck do you want, then?” And if this is it, he thinks, then this is it. His last chance. To touch her, to say goodbye, to bury the star-crossed lovers in the ground.

What Peeta holds onto when he loses everything else, and what he finds after. (Or: Peeta hijacked, Peeta rescued, Peeta recovered.)

[bananaleaves]

in the mess of things. bridgerton, t, kate/anthony, 16k.

It’s enough to come this far. Close enough to imagine himself near her, to suppose she might feel his presence. Close enough to be caught, to hurt. (and isn’t that them, always almost enough?)

The promises Anthony makes and the ones he keeps (or: the aftermath of Kate's accident and Anthony finding his way between proposals).

[AO3]

[bananaleaves]

certain foolish perfect hours. bridgerton, m, kate/anthony.

A whole house around them nesting into sleep and dreams, and here they are, hunting for space to breathe and finding—finding each other, finding this. The thing they can’t have, the things they aren’t allowed.

What she needs, what she needs—when has she ever admitted what she needs?

An expansion of the library scene.

[AO3]

[bananaleaves]

follow you down to the sound. julie and the phantoms, t, luke/julie. AU/future-fic. wip.

It's 2038, and Julie and the Phantoms are set to play at their official induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Except Luke and Julie haven't spoken to each other since the Phantoms broke up, and everyone's a little haunted. (Or the bandmates exes saga that nobody needed.)

His journey to musical success has been defined by its challenges. We talk briefly about his process of reconciling with his parents, about the rumors that music has driven a wedge in his last string of relationships. (He neither confirms nor denies.) But there’s no ignoring the enormous elephant in the room.

He wipes his mouth and strums a dissonant chord. “Yeah,” he says, clapping his hand on the strings to still them. “Let’s get it over with.”

There can be no conversation about Luke Patterson’s storied career without talking about what got him there—the band that earned him his nomination and made his name.

[bananaleaves]

follow you down to the sound. julie and the phantoms, t, luke/julie. AU/future-fic. wip.

It’s 2038, and Julie and the Phantoms are set to play at their official induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Except Luke and Julie haven’t spoken to each other since the Phantoms broke up, and everyone’s a little haunted. (Or the bandmates exes saga that nobody needed.)

She’s surprised by how much he sounds the same. She thinks the years should have been crueler about the changes somehow—his voice deeper, huskier, more changed—but maybe neither of them has changed as much as she once imagined.

chapter two

[bananaleaves]

chapter five

They’re older, he thinks. He’s let it go. None of it should matter to him anymore.

Except  he can’t help but think of how she used to lie in bed late at night, talking about nothing, sharing every thought that passed through her head, and how he wants to be the only person to know who she is in those  quiet hours. It doesn’t belong to anyone, but he thinks maybe if it  did, it should belong to the two of them.

The bartender pours him another double, and he takes a sip, feeling the heat slide down his throat before warming his chest.

He doesn’t know what’s happening to them while they’re here.

[bananaleaves]

trying this again!

anyway, here’s wonderwall. julie and the phantoms, g, luke/julie. general s1 spoilers. just fluff, basically.

Luke likes to talk about his musical influences. Julie teaches him a new one. They both learn some things.

Since she started writing with him, Julie can tell when he’s headed  down one of those mental roads that ends with him staring at her while  he figures out how it is she can’t know who he’s talking about. (There were a lot of white guy rock bands, okay? And they all sound the same. When she says that, he looks at her like she’s kicked a puppy.)

link in source so that hopefully this shows up in tags

[bananaleaves]

follow you down to the sound

chapter six -- (rating change!)

She can’t imagine all of the things that he might want to tell her. Now. In the privacy of her hotel room somewhere between midnight and morning. Before the last show of their lives. Before they say goodbye and mean it. 

[bananaleaves]

the tabernacle, reconstructed (wonder woman [2017], e, diana/steve, post-movie, ~21k.)

Steve Trevor never expected to build a life backwards. Sometimes what you get is what you get.

He wakes up, turns onto his side, and retches.

He wakes up surrounded by trees and nothing else, the sky blacked out beneath high canopies and webs of thin branches, and he wonders just how long it will take him to die. (But it’s war, of course, and he’s a soldier, and every soldier plans for the possibility.)

What he remembers is thin: his hand, shaking, weighted with the cool metal of a loaded gun; praying and praying and praying in the quiet and hearing nothing but the whir of propellers beating back the wind. What he remembers is pressing a watch into someone’s hand, confessing love the way that others confess sins, hoping for a kind of redemption and not quite deserving it.

Steve Trevor knows how it was all supposed to end.

The problem was he never quite expected it to begin again.

[. . .]

[bananaleaves]

the home fires (wonder woman [2017], e, diana/steve, post-movie fix-it, ~15k.)

"This is your time," she says. "Now. Here. Nothing, no machine, no person, can tell you how you will use it."

Living a human life is full of stops and starts, beginnings and endings. It is a lesson Diana comes to learn well.

What Diana knows of death is this—the absence, the flat taste of it on the tongue, the vision of pyres consuming bodies as spirits charge forward into eternal valor. Diana knows of Amazonian death, of the death of warriors and queens. She knows nothing of the death of men.

When men die, there are things. Boxes and boxes, packed up, sealed, sent here, sent there, to be rooted through and looked after, looked through and discarded. The things that used to be worn, used to be kept. The meaningful things, the meaningless things. The men, if possible, are buried, their bones set inside another box and dropped into the earth for keeping. If impossible, there is still the question of these boxes. She sees it in the trenches: men, clinging to the tags of fallen soldiers, holding onto the last vestiges of a life with everything that they have.

[. . .]

[bananaleaves]

nowhere’s now here (summer and smoke [tennessee williams], e, john buchanan jr./alma winemiller, post-canon, 11k.)

All she has left is the open wound of her spite. He hasn't learned yet how to ask for forgiveness. Neither of them know how to walk away from each other, or what to call the yard that stretches between them like a string of twine.

“That’s the thing about doctors,” he says. “Sometimes we like to hit the knee just to see it kick.”

“No,” she says. “I don’t think that’s got anything to do with doctors. I think that’s got everything to do with you.”

[ . . . ]