#might be the best het pairing i've written yet

[trashcornertully]

Check out my latest fanfic update on AO3! This fic has a 2nd chapter now, how good. (Yes, it's smut! I write so much lemon they call me the greengrocer!) Much cred to @terrencemcterrence for helping me engineer a really saucy continuation.

[thisbluespirit]

hello Aurelia lurking-latinist pointed me your way and said you're a Five/Tegan shipper? do you have any fics or fic recs with them, I've hardly found anything lol. seems like this is a verrrryyy niche pairing, at least on Tumblr 😅

@swinging-stars-from-satellites hi, and thanks! Yes, I am a Five/Tegan shipper! <3 I don't think I've ever written it much (well, one or two a long time ago, on Teaspoon), but I do have a couple, although they're mostly kind of gen (I love them too hard to write them, it's a thing):

Bleeding Out

Subdivide & Multiply (which is also a Five/Tegan/Nyssa/Turlough sedoretu, kind of)

Summer's Outing

But, as you say, it went really niche for a long while - although, excitingly, there seem to be a few new shippers popping up these last few months, so yay. Maybe we're getting a revival? \o/ (It's funny - at one time it was one of the most popular classic Who het pairings for quite a while and then it just... vanished.)

I do have some recs, though! I once made a Five/Tegan manifesto for a fic-reccing comm, and that includes a bunch of great stories + some links to other sources, so you might want to start there.

Plus, I think some that didn't quite make it on the list/have been posted since that I've liked:

Blue by Singe-Addams (G, 1708 words - Five/Tegan, hurt/comfort, humour)

Parfait Gentil Knight by JohnAmendAll (G, 484 words - Five/Tegan; rescues, humour)

(although tbh I have not been keeping up with my bookmarking lately and there have been some recent ones, as I said. amazing.)

Plus, check out LilacFree's stories on Teaspoon - they wrote loads of really lovely and long Five/Tegan back in the day & are still the best writer for them I've yet come across. (Their other fic is excellent, too - they wrote my fave Two, Jamie & Zoe fic as well!)

[mischief-and-tea-by-the-sea]

fanfiction asks: 4, 5, 10, 11

Thanks for the asks!

4. Do you think your style has changed over time? How so?

Oh very much so! I know that when I first started writing, I mean, I was like 13, so it was bad. Very bad. LOL I think I was trying to stick with all the Correct Ways to Write That and English Teacher Would Approve Of. Then I learned to start writing more casually - like Stephen King, but even that level of badassery didn't really settle in until the last 10-15 years or so. I've gone through the flowery euphemisms for sex scenes to just calling the things what they are to that but also working through other descriptions by using metaphor and comparisons. I donated my Roget's Thesaurus, which I thought was so cool for color names and have done my best to use comparisons (without the offensive food comparisons - gods, but it was so nice once upon a time to describe someone like Tony Stark as having coffee dark hair, but oh well...). I'm still finding my balance in writing between descriptions and working through dialogue (where to use accents and dialect differences and where not to). I guess what I'm saying is that I'm STILL changing and growing and trying not to compare myself to other writers who'll blow me away with descriptions and think "I want to write like that", which inevitably leads me into a Very Dark Place. But I definitely think that I've changed styles over the years and keep evolving.

5. You’ve posted a fic anonymously. How would someone be able to guess that you’d written it?

I was initially going to say my brand of humor - and yeah, that would probably still get me IDed out of anon, but I think even more than that, it's my Easter Eggs. I will always find ways to throw in little references to other movies/TV shows that the actors who play the characters I'm writing about have been in. That's a dead giveaway. As long as there's someone out there who gets the references.

10. What’s a theme that keeps coming up in your writing?

Overcoming past abuse/bullying, I think. Being misunderstood and finally finding people who understand and welcome you with open arms and a lot of affection (and love). Being different and never fitting in until finding a person/group of people who are also different and don't fit in for whatever reasons. Love languages coming in a variety of ways: cuddling, touches, cooking for others, characters with trust issues who've built walls around themselves being terrified the moment they find someone (several someones) who start chipping away at those walls and give them reasons to trust and to open up again, but only to these people who give them that security to be vulnerable. Characters who become so close that they are a FORCE to be reckoned with and will bring Hell right into the living rooms of the people who hurt their found family.

11. What kind of relationships are you most interested in writing?

Honestly a lot of what I put up there. I'm interested in the friendships that develop out of society's misfits (however that plays out) and those friendships becoming stronger until they fit into the found family slot and then how many of those friendships turned family shifts into romance/sex/love. I'm interested in this type of relationship between characters of all sexuality pairings (m/m, f/f, and oh how dare I???? m/f). I like turning the sitcom hetero relationships on their ass and write actual m/f relationships that are healthy and not the way they're portrayed because they do exist (even if I haven't been in one myself yet), and it's nice to snub my nose at the anti-het (or anti-bisexual m/f) people out there who say that m/f relationships are only ever destructive. I get that that's what they may have experienced, and hey, so did I, but it's not like I can't WANT and hope for that some day perhaps for myself - oh no! how dare I write about the type of relationship I might actually want for myself! That horrible taboo that people on here have decided is the worst reason for writing about relationships! *cue big dramatic eyeroll here*

But yeah. I want to write about relationships where people in the midst of potentially self-destructing for whatever reasons find other people in the midst of potentially self-destructing and communicating this in a way that they realize...shit, we shouldn't self-destruct because there's nothing fundamentally wrong with us that some good therapy, take-out, and cuddling while binging Chopped together can't work through. Maybe that's soft and vanilla and boring to some out there, but this is the shit that when I'm through writing it, I feel cleansed and new and whole again with a healed heart and a sense of accomplishment. You think I don't write conflict? I do, but I don't have to destroy my characters entirely before I give them a five second hug at the end to say, "See? I fixed them."