#also make sure you’re up to date on your tetanus shots besties!!

[shiny-eyed-corvid]

Do you ever worry that an item you pick up might be covered or laced with something gross/dangerous?

hey anon! i’m definitely mindful of this, especially in a big city like nyc that has all sorts of gross and hazardous materials around, but that’s why I pick up almost everything with a set of these bad boys that I keep in my bag at all times

they’re called trongs and are meant for handling messy food, but I was looking for a solution that was easier than stopping and putting a glove on and taking it off again all the time and these fit the bill for me!

I also wear waterproof work gloves (and sometimes a mask) when I clean items, so in general I’m not touching them with my bare skin until they have been cleaned/disinfected. And of course I always wash and/or sanitize my hands after handling any items.

Thanks for the ask! stay safe out there ✨🐦‍⬛

[tiny-maus-boots]

Queen of Hearts pt 14

A/N: thank you as always to @chloes-yellow-cup for being my bestie and still doing all the things i hate to do. and a big thanks to @kimmania for your constant encouragement and supply of Legos. i love you awesome nerds. 

14.

“Hit me with your best shot…”

Aubrey’s long arm stretched out along the back of the dark leather of the modern style sofa she was settled on. For the most part she could tune out the dry croak from the desk, but…

“Why don’t you hit me with your best shot.”

This was the sixth time in an hour that she was hearing the song. She was going to have to remind Lilly to remove it from the jukebox after tonight.

“Hit me with your best shot…”

The rough warble across from her died down and she thought for a moment that the singer had finally drifted off asleep. Aubrey’s head turned to the screen that showed a live feed of the cameras around The Dirty Bird. Movement flickered though them as Stacie and the Doc walked between the tables and around the bar toward the back office. She turned her head to check on the figure standing but slumped over her desk only to find dark blue eyes watching and waiting for her attention. The small woman raised herself to her elbows from her slouch and belted out just as the door opened.

“FIRE AWAAAAYYYYY!!! Pew pew pew.”

Aubrey sighed as Detective Mitchell’s finger guns gave out on the click of her tongue and she collapsed back over the desk to cradle a half empty bottle of grappa, ass up where she stood. Stacie’s wide eyes panned slowly toward her, body bouncing lightly with barely restrained glee.

“Oh my God….” Chloe took one look at the Detective and pinned Aubrey with a glare. “How drunk is she?”

The blonde raised a shoulder as she considered. “She’s been worse.”

“Doc. Doooooocccc….I hurt. Right. Here.” Beca raised a hand and brought it back to point at her butt. Her finger wavered as she tried to locate the exact spot which caused the most pain and then pointed for emphasis with a little too much enthusiasm. “Right. OW. Here. OWIE.”

Stacie eased onto the sofa and settled in comfortably in Aubrey’s lap to watch Doc Beale work. The redhead moved behind Beca and settled her bag on the desk. She took a great steadying breath before wrestling away the grappa from the prone detective and snapping on a pair of gloves. Aubrey admired the way Doc Beale efficiently and deftly managed to get Beca’s jeans over her hips and halfway down her legs with practiced ease. Beca seemed to admire it too because she stirred enough to look blearily over her shoulder with a smile.

“If you wanted to check out my assetsssss Doc, you didn’t have to wait til I got stabbeded in it. Right. There. Ow.”

“Yes, I see. Please stop poking the wound in your ass cheek. How even….?”

“I was tailing my guy. My big fish. Fishy fishy fishy. That’s a fun word to say.” Chloe muttered something Aubrey couldn’t hear over Stacie’s soft chuckling. “I heard that! Plenty of people would be DE-FUCKING-lighted to spend their date night starin’ at a little of this action.”

Aubrey bit her lip to keep the laugh from breaking free as the detective wiggled her ass unmindful of the tight skinny jeans trapping her legs and toppled into a slide nearly off the desk before Chloe managed to grab and right her teetering form.

“Head down, ass up. Now tell me again how you managed to get stabbed in the butt cheek with glass?”

“You said that like you’re used to giving that order. I might be down for that, just be gentle with me.”

Beca gave her a leer that the doctor promptly ignored as she prepped her tools.

“Detective, remember that I have some very sharp instruments here that I am excellent with.”

Beca gave her a dubious look but obediently turned and bent over the desk again so the other woman could examine the wound. Chloe was utterly focused on the task of cleaning and debriding the punctures in a circular pattern. Aubrey had been sure it was going to require at least a few stitches from what she saw before she called for real medical help.

“I told you. I was following the big fish.”

“And you followed him into a bar I’m guessing.”

“Right, rule numero dos of detectivering. Don’t stick out like a sore thumb.”

Chloe blinked and looked up from her work to focus on Beca. “What’s numero uno?”

“That’s not a real number, Doc.”

“Solid rebuttal.”

“Did…did you just make pun of my rump? Oh my God I’m in love. I’d get down on one knee right now and propose. Except you’re feeling up my butt right now and that’s kinda nice.”

The doctor’s bright blue eyes narrowed and she jabbed the needle into the hunk of flesh she had just grabbed in preparation for the injection. She depressed the plunger quickly as her patient yelped and attempted to squirm away.

“HEATHEN! Oh God. I’m dying. Help. I’m dying, Dr. Kevorkian is killing me….my vision…I can’t see.”

“Open your eyes, idiot. That was just an antibiotic booster. Have you had a tetanus shot recently?”

“Pretend I said whatever answer will prevent you from being a literal pain in my ass.”

It was too much for Stacie and she turned her head to bury her laughter in Aubrey’s neck. The blonde tightened her grip on her fiancée and enjoyed a satisfying laugh at the detective’s expense. She hadn’t known what she’d find when she had gotten Beca’s distress call. They had all been on high alert since coming back to Los Angeles, trying to close ranks as best they could without being obvious about it. She had been waiting for an attack to come and her first thought when she had gotten the call was that it had finally begun. Each moment waiting in her office while Lilly retrieved the Detective from her hiding place in an abandoned warehouse building down at the port had been like a stone on her chest. She had needed this humor to ease the cold grip of fear on her heart.

Aubrey’s line of business didn’t lend itself to close relationships with members of law enforcement, at least not for long. What she and the Detective had was something altogether different than any of the other criminal-cop business agreements she had formed during her career. Beca was someone she trusted at her side, more…trusted at her back. The idea that someone would try to take her out was sobering and her laughter faded. Stacie sensed the change in her and cupped Aubrey’s face gently to bring their foreheads together. Words weren’t necessary for Stacie to understand what she was thinking and feeling. The blonde took a deep breath and straightened her spine. One hand came up to adjust and smooth her tie. If it had started…she wanted to know who was coming for her people.

“So, who’s the fish?”

Beca lifted her head from the desk and struggled to focus on Aubrey. It took her a few seconds to process the question. She seemed to have forgotten the conversation while Chloe worked silently to finish working on her wound.

“A security guard. He’s got bad taste in bars and also what I would loosely refer to as ladies.”

She couldn’t imagine where a security guard would fit in with Alice’s plans and frowned. Maybe this wasn’t about her. Beca had other cases she was working, maybe this was just another Tuesday night for the cop.

“A security guard? Sounds kind of small time for you.”

Denim blue eyes flashed to hers, some of the haze of alcohol burned away by intensity of her drive. The small brunette’s lips quirked into a smirk. Aubrey was suddenly very sure that nothing Beca did was small time or without a very good reason.

“It only takes a small stone in the right place to make a rockslide.”

Chloe slowed her movements as she finished her work. Something about what Beca said must have been interesting to the doctor because she kept her attention on the detective while she cleaned up the trash and peeled her gloves off to toss in the black plastic trash bag left there for that purpose. Aubrey guessed she was re-evaluating her previous estimations of the foul mouthed, perpetually smug, woman.

“You’re not wrong, Bec. So, what’s this small stone guarding?”

“Not what. Where. Dude works at the port.” She grunted and stood gingerly with a backward glance at her own butt. “Hm. Nice, think chicks will dig the scar?”

If Chloe had been considering there may be more to Beca than outrageous flirtation it was only a brief passing fantasy. She sighed and rolled her eyes then glared at Aubrey.

“18, Aubrey.” It was almost enough to make her face split into a grin and she had to turn her chuckle into a soft cough. Chloe tied up the bag and dropped it in the trashcan sure that it would be disposed of carefully. It wasn’t the first time she’d had to patch one of them up, they knew the drill by now. “You owe me so big.”

“I’m good for it. So, Detective, what about this dock rat?”

Beca stopped checking herself out long enough to pull her pants up and wink at Chloe before answering. Doc pretended not to notice but Aubrey could see her watching Beca from the corner of her eye while she played around with the tools in her bag.

“When I figure how he connects to Richie Rich, I’ll let you know.”

Stacie’s body tensed in her arms and Aubrey glanced at her curiously. Her girl chewed her lower lip in thought, a habit that Aubrey found adorable. “Something on your mind, Stace?”

“It’s probably nothing. Just something Edith said about someone I went to prom with. His dad got him a job down at the docks.” Stacie shrugged it off but Aubrey could tell she was still chewing on it. “Probably just coincidence.”

Aubrey and Beca exchanged a look. After a lifetime of double crosses and plot twists, neither of them believed in coincidences. The detective dug around in her pocket for her phone. She wasn’t quite sober yet but a hell of a lot steadier than a few moments ago. Aubrey snatched the phone easily out of the air when it was tossed her way and glanced at the screen.

It was a video and she angled it so Stacie could see too. Her fiancée pressed play and sighed. Beca could be heard in the background giving a lot of very specific direction to the two women practically fucking on a pool table in a disgusting looking rathole of a bar. Aubrey was pretty sure the women were hookers and the corner of her mouth quirked in amusement. Stacie took the phone out of her hand turned it to face back to the detective.

“Really Beca?”

“I thought it was pretty good for my directorial debut. But your gutter brain is making you miss the real show.”

Aubrey took the phone back and focused on the whole scene. Behind the women in a shadowed booth two men were clearly having an animated discussion. One was further into the shadow than the other but his gestures were strong and decisive. She watched as the other, younger seeming, man’s gestures became conciliatory and submissive the longer the conversation went on. In the foreground a flurry of noise and activity caused the camera to shake and wildly as if it were being swung around. There were glimpses of rough faces and snatches of shouts and curses. At one point there was a good stretch of scuffed flooring where she assumed Beca had been crawling away from the obvious brawl happening around her.

The camera came up again in time to catch the men leaving their booth in a hurry. Each of them caught in the neon blue glow from beer signs on the walls. Stacie snatched the phone out of her hand and hit pause. Long legs dropped down to the floor from the sofa and she stood in shock.

“Bree…this is Senator Grant. The guy he’s with is his son Kodie, we went to high school...Jesus Christ…”

“You know him?”

“Weston stole his money.”

They looked at each other then turned twin green-eyed gazes on Detective Mitchell. The small woman’s brow was furrowed in thought, her lower lip caught between her teeth as she worried it.

“The kid is on the videos.”

Mitchell didn’t have to say which videos, they all knew. Even Doc Beale. Stacie looked away from them, uncomfortable with the knowledge that she had been in some of those videos. Aubrey let out a long settling breath and stood. She gently took the phone from Stacie’s shaking hand and brought it to lips to brush a soft kiss over Stacie’s wrist. It gave her a wan smile but it was something. Stacie would be okay. Aubrey looked down at the phone and watched the video again. And again. And once more. She studied every gesture, every twitch of posture, every unconscious expression she could make out.

“I want the kid. He’s the weak link.”

Beca grunted and limped around the desk to grab her keys and helmet, ready to go back to work with a hole in her ass nearly as big as the one in her pants. It wasn’t going to happen that way and Aubrey reached out to snag both items from the sidebar and hand them to Stacie who easily placed them on a shelf far too high for Detective Mitchell to reach without finding a stand on.

“White she devil.”

“Sorry, Bec. Can’t have you half-assing anything.”

She didn’t like it and Aubrey could tell but Beca sighed and grunted. “Solid burn.”

Aubrey gave her a quick grin then turned to eye the Doctor who was watching them all curiously. Her gaze met Aubrey’s and a brow went up. Honestly, she almost felt a little bad about needing to have the Doc take Beca somewhere safe. She didn’t ask, she didn’t need to. Chloe knew what she was thinking and started to shake her head no until Beca tried to drag a chair over to the get her stuff.

“I really hate you, Aubrey Posen.”

“No, you don’t, Doc.”

“You WILL be making a very large donation to St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital.”

“Absolutely.”

“And vacation for my office girls. Two weeks!”

“I’ll buy the plane tickets myself.”

“And if she pisses me off just once I will trank her and leave her on a park bench.”

The last was a bluff but Aubrey treated the threat seriously. “Understood. Anything else?”

“….I’ll think of something!” Aubrey bit back another grin and nodded seriously. She slipped her hands into her pockets as the doctor steeled herself mentally to take on Beca. “Come one Detective, as much as this pains me to say…you’re coming home with me.”

Beca dropped the helmet she had finally just retrieved on the ground and left it like discarded trash to limp over to Chloe. “Okay.”

“God…you’re so easy.”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing, Doc.”

Chloe gave her a final glare and slung the detective’s arms over her shoulder to help her limp out of the office. Stacie settled the length of her body along Aubrey’s back, hands coming up to finger the buttons of her vest.

“How well do you know this Kodie, joker?”

Stacie hmmm thoughtfully. “Not as well as I did in high school. Edith told me he got caught up in some trouble recently. I think I know how we can get to him though.”

“How?”

“He likes cocaine and paying for his um let’s call them dates. I had Happy make some calls for you.”

The smile came to her face easily and she leaned into Stacie’s embrace. This wasn’t anything like what her mom and dad had. Her mother had never been this involved in what her father did for work. She had kept as distant from it as she could, turning her nose up at the family that protected them, running from the darkness of the business. Stacie would never do that to her. She knew it all way down to the bottom of soul. Aubrey turned in her arms and brought their heads together.

“You got more cards up your sleeve than a Vegas croupier, you know that?”

“Hmm. I learned from the best.”

Aubrey closed the distance, her brushing softly over Stacie’s. There were a lot of words she could say about how she felt about the woman in her arms. She could probably write pages on it, but words didn’t matter half as much as action did. She was going to marry this woman and spend her life giving her the best of everything. They were going to be happy and she didn’t care who she had to kill to make it happen.

“Let me take you home?”

“Aubrey…in your arms? I’m already there.”

[fourteenacross]

2017 Fic Year in Review

2017 in fic! I still have to get used to this looking so different to how it looked from like, 2007 to 2015. I also did a lot of like...weird not!quite!fic things? Which I’m counting in my word count, just because I did put thought into them? But I’m not sure if I should? I don’t know. Anyway, I’ve had two glasses of champagne and a glass of red wine, so WHATEVER. Hamilton: Ghosthunters full-length fic Birthday Shots (2069) Commercialism, Merit Badges, and Liquid Courage (8179) Communicable (24382) Well Deserved Recognition (3738) Truth or Dare, Jungle Juice, and a Linen Closet (8532) Q&A Saturday - June 6, 2015 (1120) everyone must breathe until their dying breath (116,690*)

Ghosthunters ficlets: Mattie and Alex texting (1708) John and Francis at boarding school (794) Washington after the air grows cold around me and you (423) August 14 (573) Molly and the haunted chair (1159) Laf's sad Christmas (1656) John on the phone with his dad (1543) John's PoV on Alex's birthday body shots (1606) Alex and John's tattoo (2326) John at the beginning of but i won't go far away (1032) John draws Alex (1888) John is reckless (2036) John explains his tattoo (1307) John and Alex eat poptarts in bed (1924) Jo and Mattie, Jo realizes she's in love (715) John's birthday and turtles (1275)

Ghosthunters apocrypha: John's in the hospital (840) The Schuyler-Hamilton-Laurenses get a dog (332) July 12 (1634) August 27 (1535) November 24 (4020)

Three sentence ficlets: Herc and breakfast (129) Angelica leaving for London (canon fic) (133) John falling in love (102) Alex and art (119) Ghosthunters + tetanus shots (161) Eliza, first day of summer (113) Laf meeting George and Martha for the first time (180) John, first kiss with a boy (165) Burr, drunk and alone (172) John and Francis, getting together (164)

Ghosthunters Not!Fic: John and Mattie, fake dating (2563)

Non-Ghosthunters Hamilton fic: John and Alex share a bed on a roadtrip (2396) Supplemental not!fic to the above (2497) Alex and John on the dance floor with a surprise slow song (2038) Alex and John, almost drowning (3076) Supplement to the above (2335)

Not!Fic: John and his ghost boyfriend (4555) John and Alex, "summer in the city" roommates for a summer internship AU (1491) John and Alex, "may we meet again" teen besties meet again as adults and fall in love AU (2347) Hamilton noir AU, "we get the job done" (1522) Alex and John, "the world turned upside down" BFFs -> lovers AU (6161) Fem4Ham, "helpless" soulmate AU (6613)

Gravity Falls: Mabel, first crush on a girl (118)

Great Comet Not!Fic: Sonya, No One is Alone (756)

MCU: Sam and Steve and trick-or-treaters (467)

Grand Total Fandoms: 4 Total Full Length Fic: 7 Total Ficlets: 46 Grand Total Stories: 53 Grand Total Word Count: 235,409* 

* I'm including all the words of the ghosthunters summer story that I’ve written so far, even the ones that haven’t been posted.

Overall Thoughts: Man, this list looks so long, but it’s still so far off the mark that I had intended to hit.

This was a hard year, creatively. It was for everyone, I think, but after having a really great upswing in 2016 when my meds had leveled out, it felt particularly dire to me, even though I knew I wasn’t alone. It’s hard to absorb that sometimes, you know?

I’m disappointed I didn’t finish this summer story before the end of the year. I was making very good time this summer and cranked out like 60k words on a really good schedule. I took a break for DragonCon and the associated scrambling and packing, and then never got back on the horse. It’s one of those things where I can’t tell if it was self-discipline or brain stuff or exhaustion, but I’m mad at myself all the same, cause I’m like that. I’ve still got another 30k to write and I’m going to try to get back on a schedule and stick to it to push out these last couple scenes, but I still keep kicking myself about the whole thing.

A lot of it comes back to something I was talking about in last year’s round up, which is not having, essentially, @pearlo in this fandom. I spent like, five years sending Erica a constant stream of fic ideas and dialogue snippets and talking out every fic idea and texting her in the middle of the night with AUs and all sorts of other shit and it’s a hard transition to not having that built in. It was how I worked out a lot of issues and also expressed a lot of joy. It feels a little like screaming into a void on here, at times, and while you’re all lovely and I appreciate all your encouragement and feedback, talking about your own work all the time occasionally makes one feel like an egomaniac. So...that’s a thing.

On to more positive things! I really liked doing those sort of not!fic things--it got some of my creative juices flowing when I was blocked on ghosthunters and scratched the itch of starting a zillion stories that I had great ideas for but no time to actually follow to the finish line. Doing ficlet memes and stuff, too, felt really good, taking requests and such. Holding in-person writing dates was super helpful, and having @lisapizza around to occasionally badger into hanging out with me so I could talk about this shit.

Looking back, did you write more fic than you thought you would this year, less, or about what you'd predicted? I definitely expected to finish more, but numberwise and contentwise. I probably shouldn’t be surprised that I got much less done than I intended, given how weird the whole year has been, but I’m still kind of bummed. What pairing/genre/fandom did you write that you would never have predicted in January? Hmmmmm....I don’t know that there’s anything that I wouldn’t have predicted? Everything is pretty on par with what I’ve been doing for the past couple years? What's your own favorite story of the year? Not the most popular, but the one that makes you happiest? I loved a lot of the stories I wrote this year, because I'm super obsessed with myself. [[< -- I think I've kept that sentence in for the past few years because it remains true]] It’s hard to name anything other than everyone must breathe until their dying breath. I’ve been working on it for two years, on and off, and it was one of the first bits of character building I did as I started to create the verse. There are a lot of wonderful little character moments in it and a lot of parts I really just genuinely enjoyed writing.

Communicable was also something I was working on for a while, and there are so many lovely quiet moments. @the-everqueen actually pulled out my favorite bit of that story for commentary--that whole night they spend together at the Washingtons’ and John’s conversation with Martha the next morning were a joy to write.

Outside of the ghosthunters, the #fem4ham soulmate AU has eaten my brain and soul, and the ficlet about John and Alex sharing a bed really made me wish I had a million extra hours in the day to write about that universe’s John and his struggles. Did you take any writing risks this year? What did you learn from them? Not any huge ones? I think my biggest “risk” is the same mistake I make over and over again--feeling pressured to give people an ETA on the next story and then....totally missing that deadline. I’ve gotta stop doing that, for serious. My best story of this year: Definitely everyone must breathe until their dying breath. There are a LOT of moving parts on that thing that are still only slowly unfurling. I wish I had finished the whole thing in 2017 /o\ My most popular story of this year: Okay, see, chaptered stories totally throw off AO3 stats. Hit counts, kudos count, comment count...all of that is inflated by repeatedly pushing those fics to the top of the tags and having people come back for each chapter and all of that. Also, timing? The stuff that was up in January obviously has more hits than the stuff that only just came up in December. 

That being said, I think everyone must breathe is probably my most popular fic, but who really knows? Story of mine most under-appreciated by the universe, in my opinion: I wouldn’t say any of the full-length fics are under-appreciated, but I’m so obsessed with the #fem4ham that I sometimes forget that it has less than thirty notes and no one but @lisapizza (and @charmingpplincardigans, based on her comments today at brunch) really cared about it when I posted it XD

Most fun story to write: I wrote Birthday Shots in one sitting and it was the kind of doofy, dialogue-based stuff that’s always pretty fun to play around with. I also liked the ghosthunters apocrypha with John being loopy on anesthesia, which I wrote entirely on the plane to Heroes. John’s ghost boyfriend not!fic was also the first of those that I did and it was pretty fun! Story with the single sexiest moment: Deffo the sex in the woods in VII of everyone must breathe until their dying breath. Story with the single sweetest moment: Hm. There’s a lot of sweet, that’s kind of my whole deal. I think maybe the first house-sitting scene or the train ride after seeing Ned in everyone must breathe until their dying breath. Most "Holy crap, that's wrong, even for you" story: Nothing really. Nothing cracky for me this year. Story that shifted my own perceptions of the characters: The sharing a bed story and its backstory supplement were probably the things that had characterizations most different from the ghosthunters. It was a very different world to pick apart as I was thinking those through. Hardest story to write: Seeing as how I’m STILL WRITING everyone must breathe until their dying breath it is DEFINITELY THAT ONE  Biggest Disappointment: Just that I didn't finish more, I think. Biggest Surprise: That dumb bedsharing ficlet has over a hundred notes on tumblr. What the hell. I mean, I’m glad, but also surprised! Otherwise, I’m honestly just surprised you guys have stuck with me this long and been so incredibly patient 💜 Most Unintentionally Telling Story: Everything with Molly in everyone must breathe until their dying breath, for reasons that I’m foolishly hoping end up being moot, but realistically suspect are not going to come to fruition.  Plans for the next year: Goals for 2018! 300,000 words! Getting through two more anchor stories! Writing a non-ghosthunters Ham!fic! Work on my dumb novel! Maybe try some nonfiction stuff! I don’t know, just try to be more flexible and kinder to myself, but also get things done? God, who knows, the world is on fire.