#but Minkowski is giving that briefing anyway

[hephaestuscrew]

Minkowski would be so intense about introducing Eiffel and Hera and Lovelace to any of her loved ones back on Earth. She makes the crew sit through a PowerPoint presentation on suitable topics of conversation to discuss with her mother. She gives Dominik a folder of detailed guidance about how to interact with Hera because he's never met an AI before. She asks Eiffel several days beforehand if he has decided what he's going to wear to meet her family, as though Eiffel has ever in his life put thought into an outfit more than 30 seconds before getting dressed.

She tries to control every parameter of the interaction in a way that actually makes it more uncomfortable for everyone involved. She spends the entire time sitting right on the edge of her chair, looking anxiously between each of these people she cares about, trying to tell whether they are getting on, and attempting to communicate with them individually through urgent expressions.

And of course it doesn't work. Eiffel puts his foot in his mouth. Dominik is confused and curious about all the wrong things. Minkowski dares to leave the room for a few minutes and when she comes back, her mother is showing the crew her baby photos, and Minkowski knows she'll never live this down.

[everamazingfe]

A Close Shave

Fic Summary: After being picked up by the Urania and brought back to the Hephaestus station, Communications Officer Doug Eiffel tries to come to terms with his new look. It doesn’t go well. Luckily, Jacobi comes along to save the day. 

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Words in this fic: 2082 Pairings: Doug Eiffel/Daniel Jacobi Warnings for this fic: Brief mentions of abuse

Notes: I got into Wolf 359 at the start of this year, and after relistening to it recently I decided to start writing some fics. I was pretty nervous about posting this, but I couldn't keep it in my drafts forever, so here it is! There’s also a link to this fic over on A O 3 as the source of this post! Click it to go read it over there, or you can search up the title or ‘everamazingfe’ on the site.

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There was something about him, Eiffel had decided within the first few seconds of seeing him for the first time. His face was mostly blank unless he had some sly comment to say, some sarcastic remark, and then that stony expression was replaced by something cockier, more smug. Sometimes there was a flash of softness to it, usually when Maxwell was speaking. But even when his face was at its blankest, there was a mischievous gleam in those bright green eyes of his.

Eiffel had never really noticed anyone’s eyes before. He didn’t know Minkowski’s eye color, or Lovelace’s for that matter. Hell, Eiffel didn’t even know if he knew his own eye color at this point, he avoided looking in mirrors at all costs. But for some reason, he’d noticed Jacobi’s. Not only had he noticed it, but he had committed it to memory as well. 

For a moment, he was convinced he could picture them clearly as he stared out the window above his comms panel, making eye contact with them in the reflection of the glass. Somehow, he was able to picture his face with perfect clarity too, despite only seeing it a handful of times while he was in sound mind. 

“Feel good to be home?” The Jacobi that Eiffel thought he was picturing in his mind so clearly spoke, startling him out of his trance and making him jump because it wasn’t his imagination, it was the real deal. It made sense, he’d never had a very visual imagination anyway, but there was always hope for a change of mind. “Wow, I didn’t think I was all that scary, Officer Eiffel.”

“You’re not,” he grumbled with a huff of indignation, grabbing the edge of his station and pulling himself back to it, hooking his knees beneath it to keep himself there. “I just… Got lost in thought.”

“You? Capable of thought? Now that’s something that wasn’t included in your file.” There it was, that stupid sly grin that Jacobi always had when he thought he was being oh-so-clever. Usually, he was. But that joke had become played out within the first month on the station.

Eiffel responded with mock laughter, trying to ignore the way that comment made an invisible knife twist in his chest. After all he’d done, no one thought he was good at anything. What a surprise. But he didn’t have time to unpack all of that right then. “Get some new material, I’ve heard it all before,” he drawled, hoping he looked as bored as he sounded. “I’m a slacker, I’m an idiot, I’m a motormouth. Tell me something I don’t know.”

“Your shoe’s untied.” 

Maybe there was some truth to one of those three things, because like the idiot he was, Eiffel had that brief moment of panic everyone had when someone told them that their shoe was untied, or their fly was down, or there was something on their shirt. And because of that panic, he looked down. It had completely slipped his mind that he hadn’t even worn shoes in the two (Three? Did those hundred days hurtling through space count? He didn’t know.) years he had been on the Hephaestus. “Oh, goddammit!” He groaned as he stared down at his socked feet in dismay, trying to tune out the cackling laughter Jacobi let out behind him that sent him halfway across the room. 

“You’re also gullible, apparently!” He let himself continue his path across the room so he could push off the back wall, still in a fit of giggles as he sailed back to the console. “You actually fell for it! I can’t believe it! I’ve never gotten anyone with that before.” Jacobi’s grin was bigger than it had ever been, and he wiped the tears from his eyes before they wreaked havoc on the station’s internal systems. Maxwell was too smart to fall for a simple trick like that, and Kepler… Well, Kepler didn’t like being pranked. 

Eiffel grumbled something incoherently, waiting patiently for Jacobi to get over himself before he spoke again. “Was there a real reason you came down here?”

“No, not really. Kepler’s giving Minkowski an orientation for her new role and then he needed to discuss… something with Hilbert, I don’t even wanna know. And Ala- Maxwell’s busy with Hera. So, I was bored.”

“What about Lovelace?”

“Dunno. Didn’t ask. Didn’t care.”

“Right… So you came to interrupt my very important work?”

“Yeah, pretty much.”

“Lucky me.”

“Lucky you.” Jacobi made himself comfortable, lounging in the free-floating bliss that was zero-g as Eiffel pretended to look busy, though his eyes were fixed on the reflection of the man in the glass. The bright light of Wolf 359 backlit him beautifully, and the color in the star seemed to desaturate everything else in the reflection, except for those damn eyes. 

Eiffel let out a sigh, bringing a hand up to run it through his hair, his fingers brushing through the empty space where his long curls used to be. He let out a frustrated growl, moving his hand up to his scalp. The little hair that was left was scraggly and damaged as hell. It was coarse and patchy, and it scratched his hand uncomfortably when he ran his hand over it. “Actually. I have an idea of something we can do.” He turned around to look at the real Jacobi, who arched an eyebrow in silent encouragement for him to go on. “Come with me.”

He’d had his head shaved a handful of times, and it was usually under duress. The first time was as a punishment for getting gum stuck in it, even though he hadn’t been the one to put gum there, and it would’ve been much easier to just cut the chunk out rather than shave his whole head. The second time had been when he’d joined the military. This would make number three, but this time it was necessary, despite the fact that his goal had really been to never cut his hair again. All that length had meant a lot to him, it meant that he had control over something in his life, finally, but the cryofreeze had, apparently, had other plans for it.

Additionally, most of the shaving kits, particularly their razors, had been dismantled for Minkowski’s crusade against Blessie. God only knew where all of those had ended up, or if they were still even on the station, but he knew there was one that was still safely tucked away. 

“Wow, Eiffel. I thought you would’ve liked to wine and dine your dates before bringing them home. You always struck me as more of a gentleman than that.”

“Shut up.” He rooted around in his locker, letting various pieces of uniform and whatever else had been shoved in there float freely around them as he did so. Most of it was contraband that he should’ve been more careful about getting seen, but he was too focused. Once he found the kit, he let out a soft, ‘a ha!’ And underhand tossed it to Jacobi. “You’re shaving my head.”

For once, Jacobi didn’t have some sort of sarcastic remark to make in response. He was just confused. “Sorry?”

“I can’t… I can’t stand it being like this. I can’t. And it’ll never grow back right with the ends this damaged, and I don’t really feel like cutting myself a thousand times in the process. So you’re doing it for me.” He tried to make his voice sound commanding, authoritative, but instead he just sounded desperate, irritated, upset. His hair meant so much to him, but he could stand to be without it for a little bit. He’d done it before, he could do it again. What he couldn’t stand was the sorry excuse for hair that he’d been left with. 

“You don’t think I’d use the razor to kill you? It’d be the perfect opportunity.”

“If you wanted to kill me, you could’ve done it back on the Urania when I was half dead.” 

“You hadn’t annoyed me as much back then.”

“I mean, if you really want to, I guess you can, but… I’d really just like my head shaved, please.”

A dramatic sigh filled the silence, and then: “Ugh, fine. But you owe me.”

That was good enough for Eiffel, and he trailed along behind Jacobi to the Hephaestus’ bathroom. Gravity was a little different in there, as in it was actually present in order to make showering and other general acts of hygiene (that Eiffel didn’t really partake in) a little easier. So he was able to sit on the counter and stare their reflections down as Jacobi stood behind him, setting the kit beside him on the counter. 

Jacobi wasn’t a friend, not by a longshot. In Minkowski’s book, he was part of ‘the enemy.’ But they’d spent a decent amount of time together after he’d been picked up by the Urania, and even a little bit of time before that over the comms. Someone had to keep in touch with him and keep up-to-date on his coordinates so the ship could get a lock on his location, and Kepler had felt like that work was beneath the highly intellectual minds of himself and Maxwell, so it had fallen to Jacobi. And Eiffel hadn’t minded, because beneath all the smart remarks, the guy was alright to talk to. A little stilted, maybe, but that wasn’t anything he couldn’t work with. It was better on the Urania. Easier, at least, because Jacobi’s body language did a lot of the talking for him. Once again, helping Eiffel was deemed grunt work, so Jacobi had been the one stuck tending to his wounds, helping him get around when he was too weak to even keep his eyes open, and adjust to eating again after not doing it for a hundred days (though with all of the substitutes for rations Hilbert dared to call food, one could argue it had been even longer since he’d really eaten). 

Long story short, Eiffel liked Jacobi to some degree. The guy was alright in his book, and he was sure the feeling was mutual, because he could’ve easily said no, or done a hackjob of it, or killed him. But instead, he took his time and made sure that he didn’t miss any spots, his other hand resting gently on Eiffel’s head to keep it steady despite all the fidgeting. 

After the first pass, Eiffel moved to get off the counter, to turn around and thank Jacobi, but a firm hand on his shoulder pushed him back down. 

“I gotta go again, make sure I didn’t miss a spot. It looked awful before, but it’ll look even worse if there’s just a tiny patch with a few hairs left.”

Eiffel furrowed his eyebrows together, but nodded and got comfortable again. As comfortable as he could, at least. His ass was already numb and the feeling was starting to spread down to his legs, but hopefully the second pass would go quicker. 

And it did, kind of. Jacobi didn’t need to clean the hair from the razor as often because there was barely any left, but he still took that same slow and gentle care as he had the first time. When he was done, he wiped off the leftover shaving cream with a nearby towel, smiling genuinely as Eiffel lifted a hand to feel over his scalp. “Well? How does it feel?”

“It feels great,” he answered earnestly, laughing in relief. He didn’t hate the way his reflection looked anymore, and now he could actually believe everyone when they told him to pull it together because it would grow back eventually. Hopefully this made the process easier. His eyes drifted to Jacobi’s in the mirror, mirroring that same smile. “Thank you... I really do owe you.”

“Yeah, you do.” The genuine smile faded to his usual cocky grin, and Eiffel threw the towel at him. It hit him square in the face, but it didn’t wipe away that look. “But… You’re welcome.” He offered him a hand to help him off the counter, steadying him with a chuckle when he nearly lost his balance. “Gravity that hard on you, Doug?”

“No! It’s just… That counter was not very comfortable to sit for that long on. And yeah, I guess gravity’s pretty hard to adjust to too.” 

“Well then we’d better get you back to the lazy embrace of zero-g.”

[wolf359bigbang2017]

ARTIST SIGN-UPS ARE OPEN!

Hello, lovely lovely artists! Sign-ups are now open, and here’s how it’s going to work! Below are 20 blind-summaries of the various fics we have available, which means there are 20 slots for artists. The link to the sign-up is here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfvFYmasupxZr95CR6Tw_xvYZgHz9FWEg09ILA-D3AKChbmCQ/viewform

Pick your top three that you’d like to make art for, and I’ll do my best to get you matched up! This is first-come, first-served, so if you wait until the end of the deadline (MAY 3), the fic you wanted may not be available. If all three of your choices are already taken, I’ll message you and we’ll try to work something out.

SUMMARIES:

1

Characters/Pairings: Mentions of both jacoffel and kepcobi (focusing heavily on the latter)

Rating: T (mildly suggestive language may be used, but nothing explicit)

Word count: Will hopefully be 1k-3k, but i can’t be 100% sure

Summary: Jacobi-centric, 2nd person POV, exploring backstory, and giving his side of Boléro, while he’s alone on the observation deck, with a heaping of angst. Also, trans Jacobi.

2

Characters/Pairings: Lovelace, Minkowski, SI-5 Crew, Cutter, Pryce, Eiffel, Hilbert, brief appearance by Dominik

Rating: T

Word count: 3 to 5k

Summary: The gods choose heroes, the heroes kill monsters, and no one challenges the order of things. Until Renee Minkowski is marked as a hero and sent to kill the elusive Isabel Lovelace, another hero gone rogue. Minkowski tracks her down, they form an alliance, and then kill the gods.

3

Characters: Hera

Rating: T

Word count: 3-5k

Summary: Hera’s shenanigans at Goddard before she ever tried to escape the place that made her. Why was Unit 214 passed over in review when she was such a strong candidate? What exactly made her want to rebel anyways? And  just how comforting can a friend be to the value of one’s own humanity? Morality? Fun? Yeah. She had that once.

4

Characters/Pairings: past Minkowski/Koudelka and minor background Koudelka/OC. Koudelka is the main character and Anne Eiffel and Rachel have small roles

Rating: T

Word count: about 4k

Summary: About ten years after the events of the latest episode, a chance encounter prompts Koudelka to uncover new evidence about Renee’s death, and he slowly learns that very little of what he was told was the truth.

5

Characters/Pairing: Eiffel&Minkowski, could be read as Minffel but mostly friendship

Rating: General Audiences

Word Count: between 1000 and 3000 hopefully

Summary: Eiffel and Minkowski at a dinner party, held for them as survivors of the Hephaestus mission. Bickering. Stargazing. Dancing. Zero gravity. Minkwoski in a dress.

6

Characters/Pairings: Kepcobi

Rating: T, if higher it’s going to be for blood and descriptions of violence most likely, rather than anything sexual

Word count: Probably around 2k words? Maybe a bit more.

Summary: Kepler makes a mistake and gets captured. It’s not a fun time. However, he gets to learn that the sight of Jacobi covered in blood is one that he doesn’t mind at all

7

Characters: SI5

Rating: Gen

Word count: 3000 words

Summary: it’s about an si5 mission (gone wrong) with background kepcobi from maxwell’s perspective.

8

Characters/Pairings: Minkowski, Lovelace

Rating: T

Word count: probably up to 5000 words

Summary: Lovelace and Minkowski go on a road trip. The stars are shining, the air is fresh and nothing is following them through the wastelands. They get drunk on cheap wine and laugh a bit too loud but that’s okay, nobody can hear them anyway.

9

Characters/Pairings: it’s gonna be eiffel, hera, maxwell, and pryce to a much lesser extent, and it’s for SURE gonna be herawell

Rating: SFW

Word count: not sure on the word count but it’s 7 chapters long so at the max it’ll end up being 7k

Summary: Almost as soon as he’s out of prison, Doug Eiffel starts hearing voices. Well – one voice, mainly. She calls herself Hera. She says she’s a spirit. That Eiffel’s a spirit medium. And that he’s not the only one who can see her.

10

Characters: Annie, Maxwell, Hera

Rating: Teen and Up (for language)

Word count: probably 5k

Summary: Annie Eiffel, age sixteen, does not want to be reminded of her dead father. Which is nearly impossible when her new robotics teacher claims to have served with him on the space station that supposedly blew up with him inside. Featuring a cross-country road-trip, unhelpful AI, secret cats, and a personal essay for college admissions.

11

Characters/Pairings: kepcobi, minlace, herawell

Rating: T/light M

Word count: approx 8k

Summary: wolf 359 orchestra au, where the hephaestus-urania crews are in an orchestra funded by pryce and cutter. the goal for this orchestra is to perform at the local concert hall but conductor kepler is finding it harder than expected to whip his scraggly troupe into shape.

12

Characters/Pairings: SI5

Rating: T

Word count: 15k-ish

Summary: After a mission that went horribly wrong, Kepler, Jacobi, and Maxwell go undercover at a black tie event. Jacobi and Maxwell are less than enthused. Also explores the relationships/team dynamic of the SI-5.

13

Characters/Pairings: will include all characters but focus on the SI-5 team and eiffel, kepcobi

Rating: T, verging on M (no explicit sex)

Word count: probably around 5,000 words

Summary: turns out maxwell and jacobi secretly outranked kepler all along, and he’s outlived his usefulness.

14

Characters/Pairings: Minkowski, Minkowski’s husband, Eiffel, Eiffel’s daughter, Hilbert, and Hilbert’s sister, the only pairings would be Minkowski/her husband. I guess also past Eiffel/his girlfriend

Rating: Should be General / K+. The highest might be T, but I won’t get into M/NSFW territory at all

Word count: I expect that I’d hit 5k maximum

Summary: A story of those left behind. Recollections of our crew from the POV of their loved ones, and their reactions to the (false) news that they’ve died

15

Characters: Hera

Rating: somewhere in the k-t range depending on how much I decide to cuss

Word count: Drabble type thing. 1-2k words ish.

Summary: Hera reflects on the past, friends, home, and being a person.

16

Characters/Pairings: Whole cast

Rating: T and up

Word count: TBD

Summary: The concept is the characters all have super powers. Doug, Hera, and Rene find themselves hiding in Hilbert’s lab as they run from a mysterious government organization trying to kidnap them (basically, the AM from The Bright Sessions). Hilbert claims to be a former scientist of theirs, but now offers protection and healing to Atypicals. He begins to test on Doug to help control his powers while the girls start mapping out their next plan- but this all falls apart when Lovelace (an old patient of Hilbert’s that he turned in to the AM) shows up again, with Kepler, Jacobi, and Maxwell hot on her tail.

17

Characters: Jacobi and Kepler

Rating: T

Word count: 1000

Summary: In the immediate aftermath of Desperate Measures, Jacobi and Kepler are being held prisoner in the observation deck-cum-brig. They should be sleeping, or having a proper conversation about the hot water they’ve landed in. Being Kepler and Jacobi, they do neither. Plus, pathetic fallacy, the difference between cobalt and navy, good little prisoners, and brown eyes.

18

Characters: Lovelace, Eiffel, Minkowski, Koudelka

Rating: T

Word count is 3k-5k

Summary: post-Hephaestus AU where Lovelace, Eiffel, and Minkowski are the only ones to make it back to earth. There are three chapters, one in each character’s POV. Lovelace’s is in the shuttle on the way home, Doug’s is a confrontation with the now evil and Goddard-aligned Koudelka, and Minkowski’s is the three of them getting together romantically. It’s a companion piece to the already posted “ambiance”

19

Characters: Eiffel, Minkowski, assorted neighbors, one crochety cat

Rating: T-ish

Word count: 4k-ish

Summary: The thing they don’t tell you about surviving, about clawing your bloody, beaten way back home and licking your wounds, about chipping away at a semblance of a life when everyone you love is either dead or thinks you are—the thing they don’t tell you is that you usually wish you hadn’t.

20

Characters: focuses on lovelace with appearances by the current hephaestus crew and mentions of the past one.

Rating: T

Word count:  1-2k maybe?

Summary:  She's been a captain and a leader and a friend, she hopes. She's played chess and broken the rules and died three times, and each time her world turned upside down. Isabelle Lovelace reflects on her life, death, and rebirth.

[countthelions]

the OG crew lounge, feat. a bystander 

Even with Hera giving Lovelace a briefing on the crew, she hadn’t expected this, whatever this was, to happen.

She was in the mess hall with Eiffel, who for the most part, was focusing on his work with a diligence she assumed was abnormal. His meal-in-a-glass floated aimlessly around his head, the communications officer reading through logs of his equipment and making notes on various portions of the pages as he flipped through. That wasn’t the weird part though. The weird part was when Solberg-Hilbert floated in, got his meal, saw Eiffel lounging, and joined him. Rather than remarking on this strange occurrence, Eiffel only shuffled his limbs into a better position when the doctor leaned against him and looped his fingers through one of Eiffel’s belt loops to keep them from separating.

Lovelace stared, blinking in confusion. There was an easy conversation at this point, Hilbert asking about Eiffel’s paperwork, and getting one of the man’s odd responses. As the conversation dissolved into what she was discovering was familiar bickering, she felt like she was intruding. How long had this been going on?

 “You boys got started without me,” A voice popped up over the noise, Minkowski floating in with her own data-pad. “And you took the good Doug spot.”

 “Sorry Commander,” “You were too slow.” Came the overlapping responses, the smug response from Hilbert. Whatever spot he had claimed leaning against Eiffel was apparently, the best.

 “No worries, that just means I get the coveted leg spot on Dr. Hilbert.”  Which Minkowski took with glee, the three of them now forming an odd little triangle.

 “Aw man, Commander! I thought I was the best lounge spot.” Eiffel sighed dramatically, as if this argument had happened before, and regardless of losing it every single time, he was going to have it again. Despite what his voice said, he hooked a foot around Minkowski’s ankle anyways when her legs swung across his.

 “What are you, twelve?” Hilbert’s voice held no venom, a gentle scoff at the situation before returning to his data-pad after Minkowski tucked her free hand around his arm to keep their triangle in place.

 “Yes, he is, we’ve discussed this already. Back to work.” Her voice was one of command, silencing the starting debate before it could even take flight.

 Silence settled over the room. None of them had even noticed Lovelace floating in the corner, her coffee cooling in her grip. If she squinted, she could pretend her old crew was there, comfortably leaning against each other and arguing about things of varying levels of importance. In this world, Eiffel broke the quiet with something nonsensical, presumably picking it up from reading over Hilbert’s arm judging by the man’s response. Minkowski only sighed as the two men fired up.

 It was comfortable, Lovelace decided. As ridiculous as they were all were to one another, there was still something to be said about needing physical contact and they had figured out how to get along enough to share space for a moment. She leaned against the wall, closing her eyes and enjoying the overlapping memories crash into the present.