#nobodymarksyou

[kaydeefalls]

For the ask meme: The Conspirator's Gift

3, 19, 25

(Also: this got me into Cadfael!)

OH AWESOME! I'm so thrilled to have lured you into my fave comfy mystery series! <3 So: The Conspirator's Gift - my incredibly niche X-Men fusion AU.

3. Any deleted scenes that didn't make it into the fic?

This fucker is over 80k words, does it LOOK like I deleted anything? 🤣In all honesty, though, I don't tend to delete entire scenes once I've written them -- it happens, but it's VERY rare -- mostly because I edit so continuously as I write that I rarely get to a point where a scene needs to be excised wholesale. It just gets reworked. For this fic, the biggest edit I made was swapping an entire character out of the story and replacing her. Moira, in this fic, started out as Rogue (with Moira in a very minor role as her maidservent). I was well over 10k into writing it when I realized that her character just wasn't working the way I wanted, and the subplot of her hiding her own mutation was going to needlessly complicate an already twisty plot (originally, the climactic fight scene was going to end up in Rogue's hands, quite literally). Fortunately, that character had only made a couple of appearances at that point, so it wasn't too difficult to rewrite those scenes, but it did involve a serious tonal shift -- Rogue was a teenager terrified of her own powers, so changing her to be the much more mature, level-headed, nonpowered Moira did make a significant difference. But I think the story worked better for it in the end. It places the responsibility for the villain's downfall squarely on Erik, who is in fact our primary POV character, rather than the Deus Ex Machina of a relatively minor secondary character swooping in at the last minute. (Hilariously, though, the entire reason I chose Remy LeBeau as a central character was due to the Rogue/Gambit comicsverse relationship. But by then I'd worked the whole plot around him, so he stayed.)

19. Did you make any major changes to your fic compared to your original idea?

LOL I answered the last question before reading this one! So, uh, yes, yes I did. I'm still sorry to have lost Rogue as a character, I do love her. That was the only significant change I made while in progress. Um, originally I think I had Sean (Banshee) as the villain, too, because I was trying to stick with XMFC characters, but he just didn't suit the role, he was nixed before I started actually writing anything. Armando's role grew significantly over the course of the fic, to the point where I went back and added in scenes with him earlier on. And while it wasn't a change, exactly, I didn't decide what would happen with Hank/Raven until pretty close to the end of writing it -- there was a good chance he could have ridden off into the sunset with her in the end.

25. Favorite thing about the fic - this is your permission to brag!

Look, writing this fic singlehandedly dragged me out of a 3-year fannish hiatus and I genuinely love it to bits even if only a handful of folks read it. Because when you haven't written anything beyond a handful of short Yuletide fics in three years, you really wanna dive back in with an 80k epic. But seriously, this is one of my favorite fics I've written, it was an enormously fun jigsaw puzzle to combine the X-Men characters with the Cadfael setting/plot, and I'm super happy with how it all turned out. In a very nerdy way, my single favorite thing about the fic is that in 80k words of ensemble cast and multiple POVs, Charles Xavier -- the secondary lead and half of the main damn pairing -- only gets one POV scene in the entire fucking fic, and it's right near the end (the climactic villain reveal). Hard to sustain a mystery when your POV character is a telepath, is what I'm saying. He possesses way too much info to be allowed to narrate. ;)

[kaydeefalls]

F: Share a snippet from one of your favourite dialogue scenes you've written and explain why you're proud of it.

Do a brag!

U: Share three of your favourite fic writers and why you like them so much.

Brag for someone else!

Here we go!

For F - oh, I HATE this part, whenever I pick through my own writing trying to find a good pull quote I inevitably come to the conclusion that I have never written a clever line in my life. But okay. Yusuf and Nicolò's argument, early on in lessons exquisitely crafted:

"I'm not one of your priests, to offer absolution," he says tightly, brushing the crumbs from his tunic and getting to his feet. "So don't waste your apologies on me."

Nicolò looks up at him, and Yusuf can't begin to pick out the myriad emotions lurking in the depths of his eyes. "What would you have me do, then?"

"It's not for me to tell you," Yusuf snaps. "Is that why you've followed me all this way, Nicolò? Out of some bullshit desire for atonement? Am I to play your confessor?"

"No, of course not! Please, Yusuf—"

"Then why?"

"Because I know you," Nicolò says, utterly sincere in his desperation. "Because we are the same, you and I. Because it is a gift that binds us, and even in Jerusalem I knew it, and so did you."

Yusuf stands transfixed for a moment. He has to ball his hands into fists at his sides, fingernails cutting into the soft skin of his palms, to keep from reaching out to him. But he can't, he can't, no matter how soft and luminous this man's eyes are in the predawn light, no matter how passionately he speaks now. Because Nicolò is wrong. "We are not the same," Yusuf tells him, slowly and precisely. "And you hardly know me at all."

I normally don't like writing arguments, because they stress me out, but this one flowed very naturally, and felt good to me. Neither of them are being jerks, they're just...reacting from their own perspectives, and it sucks, because neither is ready to hear what the other is saying.

For U: okay, I just checked, and apparently I'm subscribed to over a hundred authors on AO3. I say this because picking favorites is HARD, folks. Apparently I have over a hundred faves.

Okay, top three fic writers who come to mind in this particular moment (for TOG, since that's by far my most active fandom right now):

@sheafrotherdon writes the most gorgeous, soft, lyrical love stories; if I'm feeling sad and need to believe in love, hers are the fics I tend to revisit. One of the glorious things about TOG (for me) is how it sucked in so many writers I'd loved from prior fandoms; I recognized the name from WAY back in Remus/Sirius fandom days, and was so excited to know she was writing TOG now. (This is why it's fun to stick to one pseud over multiple fandoms! People recognize you and get excited years later!)

@sixth-light writes the sorts of AUs I thought I'd never care for (among many other things!), but her writing is just so clever and fun that I'll read any scenario she comes up with, without hesitation. Enjoyable reading guaranteed.

@emjee GETS these characters and writes them so...deeply romantically. I don't even know, I just love how very much they love each other in her fics. I've reread all her Joe/Nicky fics a truly embarrassing number of times, because they're just so kind.

[kaydeefalls]

Re. the ask post: Others have already talked about your characterization, which is fantastic, so: when you write romance, I always believe that the characters actually find each other unique and fascinating and wonderful, and want to be around each other, in ways that are specific to them and their relationship--something that I think is *really* hard to do, and very few authors pull off.

Thank you so much, I'm really glad to hear that element works for you! It's definitely what sucks me into any particular pairing - the particular relationship dynamics that these two specific people have together, and what makes them uniquely them. (And if it's an AU, how to preserve that unique element of their relationship despite very different settings or circumstances, which is also a fun puzzle for me.) It's what I love reading most in shippy fic, too. ❤️Love is awesome, in all its forms, and by far my favorite thing to write!

[kaydeefalls]

Yayyyy love an ask prompt!

For Joe/Nicky:

If you had to take them and plunk them into another fandom, what fandom would that be? Why?

Andy/Quynh:

Favorite headcanon trope/idea? (Your own or someone else’s)

Excellent, thank you!

For Joe/Nicky in another fandom...look, I love me a good fusion AU (case in point), so I could take these two and put them pretty much ANYWHERE and be quite content. But let's be real, I still have yet to see the Doctor Who crossover of my heart. Like, there are so many ways you could do it! Keep both canons 100% intact, and the Doctor will just periodically run across these random immortals in a certain range of Earth history, and is super casual about it (completely baffling their companion of the moment). Or maybe the Doctor crashed in Jerusalem in 1099 and somehow accidentally intervened in a way that forced Yusuf and Nicolo to make nice. Or Jack Harkness shows up for a threesome. I just feel like Who is the perfect fandom for any vaguely historical-flavored canon. And also it would be nice for the immortals to get to see a bit more of time and space than just the slow path, and see that they really are doing good in the balance. (That got...very not ship-specific, sorry, but still!)

Andy/Quynh headcanon -- I have a fondness for fics where Andy regains her immortality due to finding Quynh again, or, alternately, where Quynh loses hers upon finding Andy. I am just Soft for the idea that whenever they go, it'll be together. After the shit they've been through, they've earned it. (Ironically, though, that's not how I write future!fic myself. I don't even know. Mostly because I both want to honor the fact that Andy is mortal now and those stakes are real, but also just really like writing Quynh, dammit.)