#posts like this make me miss livejournal

[boomstab-papa]

"but i don't know how pillowfort works 🥺"

Well, come over here and learn!

This post has some good tips that even I was wondering about... but I think a lot of these are great features

[olderthannetfic]

I always see people reminiscing about the Good Ole Days and about how antis are a new thing but. . .is that really true? Or am I just being autistic and taking things too literally, and they just mean it's way more of a common debate now than it used to be before, and that the landscape of shipwank has changed?

Idk, it's like I constantly hear about fandom wank and shipwars and censorship from decades ago, and yes I know "shipping/doxxing/censorship has always existed" can co exist with "antis are new" but I think there's still a bit of a comprehension gap on my end.

am i just dumb? What am I missing here? FWIW - I do feel like the context of "anti" has definitely changed. Back in early 2010s tumblr (I cannot speak of other website/platforms) I remember that tagging something as #Anti Donkey Kong didn't mean you think DK is an evil abusive monster and that everyone who likes him/mains him is also an evil abusive monster and that Nintendo is pushing the evil abusive monster agenda. #Anti Donkey Kong would just be character bashing, wank, letting out your grievances about how ugly DK is, etc, but it was really just a tag used for your own personal opinions (and for DK fans to filter out). Whereas now #Anti Donkey Kong would mean please go die and delete all your accounts if you support DK.

So I definitely know that "anti" has a way more intense definition now than it used to - but for some reason I find it a bit hard to grasp just how new this whole anti thing even is in the firstplace. It honestly makes me sad that I've never seen a pre-anti internet, assuming there really was a time before antis.

--

Antis are new. Specifically, the "Conservative Protestantism in a gay hat" thing that that one tumblr post pointed out is new.

We had doxxing in the past. We had masses of shipwank. We also had "How dare you write that m/m ship. It's bad!"

The key is that the "Your m/m ship is bad" crowd used to openly be conservative Christian homophobes who objected to homosexuality itself. Nowadays, they're queer 20-somethings who like m/m ships but object to gay sex.

It's the anti-kink, anti-fantasy brigade coming from "our side" instead of the outside, essentially. It's respectability politics about "Sempai will love me if I just sanitize The Community and kick out the icky weirdos". It's personal disgust masquerading as morality where once it would have been masquerading as intellectual superiority.

It's a product of queerness being more public and tolerated overall. In the past, a lot of spaces devoted to m/m shipping had to be aggressively in favor of contentious fiction because the existence of anything m/m was itself contentious. There was plenty of "Well, my gay best friend said ___ is unrealistic, and my slash is good, unlike that of you plebes!" There was much less "Fujoshi means fetishizer".

Of course, I'm comparing the 90s internet to now or the mid 00s Livejournal fandom to Tumblr of this past decade. It really depends on whether Ye Olden Times was five years ago or twenty five.

The modern use of the term 'anti' did indeed grow out of the old habit of tagging your hate. As the default cultural mode shifted from "My NOTP is dumb" to "My NOTP is problematic", the usage changed. At some point, antis started getting offended by their self-applied term and pretending that the other side inflicted it on them. This is revisionism. Fiction-is-not-reality had some writeups with citations in the past.

The big shifts were happening around 2012-2016. The long slide into puritywankers being everywhere has only continued since then, but that's where the tipping point seems to have been. TikTok exacerbates this nonsense, and there are clearly plenty of people who are anti-queer and only weaponizing clueless queer youth.

The big shift is that liking m/m used to weed out most of the worst people, and now it attracts lots of them who will not fucking go away because they like the same ship, just the hand-holdy, no dicks can touch ever version.

They spend their time bleating about how AO3 should have been built for them and how anti-censorship activism doesn't matter... because they've grown up in a fandom world dominated by AO3, which shelters them from the reality that the "Ewww, all m/m sucks!" crowd is everywhere on other sites to this day.

That's probably why the shift is when it is. Certain aspects of mainstream queer acceptance were on the rise just as AO3 was getting big. But at the same time, the world is shit and everyone has anxiety they self-medicate through rage and security theater around sniffing out The Bad People.

[jessaerys]

that post about fandom etiquette wrt to posts you don't agree with is baffling 2 me because it's as broad a question as "what is the right way to interact with strangers" like truly it depends. is it a post reblogged by a mutual, is it a post made by a mutual, is it a post in the tags, if yes, does the person seem cool enough to be open to a fun chat or insane in that "too emotionally invested in The Character that it's a thinly veiled self insert" kind of way; is the take nuanced enough that i think interacting with this person will be fun and enriching or is it a case of "this person is so blatantly wrong i need to say something about it" am i tired/hungry/busy/otherwise not feeling like engaging. it makes me miss livejournal because the fandom spaces there where clearly delineated in their purpose - there were spaces for art and fic and general discussion of source material. if someone made a meta post you talked about the meta in the comments, you were welcome to engage or not; it depended on whether it was submitted to a community or was on your own personal page. tumblr's "everything in one place, everyone's personal blogs bumping against each other's" system really completely eliminates the clarity of a post's intention, which means replying to it is always a "am i going to piss this person off" guessing game. which is annoying. but anyway i love being disagreed with but you have to present your arguments to the class. i don't fuck with nerds who take well thought out disagreement as conflict. bro we are scholars

[rageprufrock]

A director's cut on Wayfinding would be amazing. I'm living in eternal hope, that it will be updated some day.

I literally say this all the time and literally nobody believes me, so you know what, here, let's all have a little treat -- 3/4 of Ch 2 of Wayfinding, some of which has been posted before during the LIVEJOURNAL days and a lot of which has never been posted at all.

Happy reading!

Your sons and daughters will be given to another nation, and you will wear out your eyes watching for them day after day, powerless to lift a hand.

—Deuteronomy 28:41

JOHN

Dee, at three, is the most beautiful girl alive. She has dark blond hair and mossy green eyes, and when she laughs John feels his knees go weak, like he wants to drop down and pick her up and clutch her in his arms, like that's why little girls laugh to begin with: to get out of walking to the playground. 

Mary's out talking to adults, people who converse in full and complete sentences, she says, but John likes Deanna better. They get each other, they always have, and they talk in the secret language of favored fathers and daughters, instantly fluent in each other. She talks by waving her chubby hands, by tugging at his jeans, by crawling up into his lap in their living room, by touching his face, and when he smiles at her, she beams back and John feels his heart clutch in his chest because he loves her so much. She babbles at him about her day, and what sandwiches she and Mommy made, about the songs they sang, and how much she missed Daddy. 

John never know he could love anyone this much. It scares him how much he loves her. 

He takes her to the playground, pushes her on the swings, wants her to go as high as she wants, as fast as she likes, anywhere she seeks. At night, he thinks about when she gets older, about having to share her with the teachers at school, with the little brother or sister he and Mary have been thinking about having one day. He worries she might fall down, that people will disappoint her, that her life will be hard. He worries that nobody will understand how amazing she is, about if she'll know how to do her own taxes, and if she'll get mad if he tries to do them for her. He worries about her SAT scores, and if she'll be embarrassed that he's a mechanic and not a doctor or lawyer; he looks up law schools. He thinks about what he'll do if she ever stops loving him the way she does, if she stops looking at him like he's a giant who can fix anything, the way it makes him feel shit-scared and like Superman all at once. He gets sick thinking about boys making her cry, about one day when he has to let go of her hand in a church and give her over to someone else, and how he might not live through it, giving up his perfect girl.

John knows it's a dream, because it's been a long time since Deanna's hair curled like that, since she wore green t-shirts and pink shorts, tiny yellow sneakers and looped her arms around Dad's shoulders. 

More than that, he remembers, like the first burn of Alistair's knife into the flesh of his thigh in hell, the day Deanna stopped looking at him like that, when he'd looked at her heartbreakingly beautiful face and all he'd seen was how tired and hurt she was, and knew he couldn't do fucking shit about it. For all the boys he'd been scared would hurt her feelings, John knows he's done the worst, that he's left the deepest scars. Sometimes he thinks that if only his handlers in hell had known how much that had hurt him, and how long, how deep, they wouldn't have bothered with knives, with fire, with peeling off the individual fibers of his muscles at all. 

But right now, right here, in this haze of sleep he doesn't deserve, it's Lawrence and Dee's three; they are walking home from the playground at six o'clock. He hasn't failed her yet, and all Dee knows is that he's her daddy, and that her momma's waiting at home, and that when she wakes up tomorrow there will be pancake men on the griddle and that life is good. It's all John's ever wanted her to know, and the one fucking thing he couldn't leave her. Even this is all his. He doubts Deanna remembers. 

"John."

He blinks. It's Lawrence. It's 1982.

"John. You must wake up."

He gasps, and his heart roars into his throat.

John blinks again, and it's Chapel Hill. It's 2008. 

"John. Wake up."

"Jesus fucking Christ," he chokes out, and pushes himself up. His whole body hurts. He's 54 years-old and he feels every fucking year; he's 54 years-old plus 200-odd years in hell, and feels those, too, the memory of pain, too fierce for all the human words he knows, and too small, now, for all the demonology he learned in the pit.

At the foot of his fucking bed, Castiel is staring at him, crazy-eyed.

"What the fuck do you want?" he growls, and rolls over onto his side, swinging his legs off the edge of the mattress. He hears his spine creak, his knees protest. He's too old for this, and it's still raining, the wetness seeping into his joints and making them hurt.

"Deanna is gone," Castiel tells him, short like a gunshot.

John freezes. "What do you — ?" 

"I cannot find her," Castiel says, and he looks away from John, stares out the window into the rain. "She's not here."

John already feels sick, nauseated, but he says, "Hell, look, she might like you, but that doesn't give you leave to follow her around, you feathery fuck."

"She's not here," Cas says again, precise, and this time, when he meet's John's gaze, his eyes are blazing. 

John swallows. "Maybe she's at work," he says. 

"Her car is here," Cas rejoins. "She told her coworkers yesterday she was quitting her job. I heard her on her telephone. I didn't know what it meant, at the time."

John hears himself say, "Fuck," and then he's out of bed, all the pain subsumed into something bigger, dizzying fear that claws at him like the hellhounds had, and he barrels out of his room and down the hall, shouting for Sam.

In Deanna's bedroom, they find letters. She wrote one to Sam, one to Bobby, to Missouri and Ellen and Jo and hell, Ash. There's a letter to John, one to fucking Castiel. On the dresser, near her piles of unworn earrings and an origami crane, there are her car keys, and a Post-It saying: FOR SAM. DAD, DON'T LET HIM FUCK UP MY BABY.

"God damn it," John yells, and whirls around on Castiel. "How can you not find her? You're — you're a fucking angel."

"I recognize souls," Castiel growls. "And Deanna's is — "

He cuts himself off, looking away again, and John's grateful for that, at least. He's already busted his hands on Castiel's face once, he doesn't need to do it again. 

" — And I cannot find Deanna's," Castiel finishes, selecting his words carefully.

They toss the house. They search it from the corners of the attic into the basement, and Castiel flits from corner to corner, there and gone again in a heartbeat, and John almost drives Sam's fucking car into a tree when Castiel pops up in the God damn passenger seat as John's driving through campus, looking for any sign of her.

"You're wasting time," Castiel grinds out. 

"She can't have gotten far by foot," John snarls. He fucking hates angels.

"She's not a child," Castiel retorts. "She didn't run away."

"It's been eight hours — she could be entire states away," John says, clutching at the steering wheel, because she could be, and he has to believe it.

"She's not in any state," Castiel says, impatient. "She is not in North America. She is not in the Western Hemisphere and she is not on Earth. I looked for her from the top of Everest and I dove past the continental shelf and there's no sign of her — not a trace."

John would throw up if there was anything in his belly to throw up.

"Well, what the hell does that mean?" he asks, his voice is breaking and pitchy with panic. "What — does that mean she's dead?"

Castiel is quiet for a long time, too long, before he murmurs, "It means someone, or something, strong enough to disguise her from me has her."

John slants him a look. "Maybe you're not looking hard enough."

And when Castiel's eyes meet John's, John thinks he remembers — against the unrelenting red of hell, like a gash mid-putrefaction, endlessly dying — beyond the blue irises and black pupils and all the human trappings that John sees now, something terrible and beautiful and so huge John can never know it in complete. 

"I have always known where Deanna is — I did not lose her, she was taken," Castiel tells him — the "from me" is silent. His voice sounds like the endless, hollow spaces of a library, the air filling up a basilica: old and huge and knowing. 

"Jesus fucking Christ," John says, and turns back toward the house, where the car pulls into the driveway just in time for to hear Sam screaming, for John to throw the car into park, tear out of the side door. 

He follows the sound of Sam shouting — for help, for anyone, oh God, please, no, no — his voice getting hoarser and thinner, and when John gets into the barn, Castiel's already there, filling the air with something that sounds like a fucking siren on mute, just the press and urgency and terror of it, getting louder by the fucking minute.

John's about to ask, "Sam, what — ?" when he sees it.

***

In hell, there are stages. 

In the early days, John was too busy reeling from the horribleness, the sheer and terrible evil of the place to process anything, and the soul is strangely cerebral in the way it shuts down for preservation, he thought, watching demons scrape his skin from his muscle, peel him apart like an onion oozing blood. 

The nerves wear away and at some point it's just nausea, awareness, that hurts, and not the way the guts of you feel any physical pain. It's when they run out of skin to cut and things to rape and nerves to twist and blood to drain and the agony of your physical body vanishes into nerveless oblivion that it all gets dicey, that it gets worse, that it gets into the territory of things John Winchester doesn't know how to describe, can barely remember accurately, just feels like a physical lurch through spaces his body occupies that he doesn't know how to name. But he knows this: for the first year after the pain stopped terrifying him, when the easy kick of horror wore off, a demon named Alistair had dragged Deanna onto the rack. 

It wasn't Deanna, but it was, and John will never forget her shaking lower lip, her cheeks, dirty and wet with tears, what Alistair did to her, or how the last breaths of her rattled out of her chest over and over again, every day, and how he always screamed, even when his lungs had been clawed out of his chest. They brought her in when she was a grown woman, beautiful like his last clear memories of her; they dragged her down as a gangly limbed girl; they strapped her onto the rack when she was ten and screaming, turning her face toward him and shouting for help; they carried her over, frozen, green eyes swimming with tears, when she was five, when she was brand new. 

When he was numb to that, too, to watching his baby girl die over and over again, when he was too tired of being ripped up — and that had been terrible in its own way — they'd brought out Sam.

***

Sam's hunched over, on the floor, making hurt, animal noises in the dirt, his body a broken arch over where Deanna's on the floor, her hair a dark gold spill across the floor.

Her eyes are glassy and open and dead, one hand flung out, fingers curled delicately, and from the neck down she's been ripped to pieces. There're long gashes down her chest and belly, blood soaking dark and day-old into the dirt, a messy spatter of gore on her bleached and blue-white skin, on the curve of her chin. Her UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA-CHAPEL HILL SCHOOL OF NURSING t-shirt is shredded, and John can see the ghastly white of a bone in all the blood and he thinks, no, no. 

Her hair is dirty, matted, and getting worse from where Sam is brushing her bangs back away from her face, he keeps gasping, "No, Dee, no, please, no, Deanna." John doesn't know it until he hits the dirt that his knees are giving out, that he's falling to them, and then he's crawling forward on all fours to Sam, to Deanna, to where Sam's face is slick-wet with tears and he's run out of words.

John pulls Deanna's head into his lap — hands shaking — and when he tries to suck in a breath it hurts like a knife in the gut. He palms her cheeks. He touches Deanna's mouth. He brushes the corners of her eyes, her throat — the white skin of it, too still — and he strokes her arm, the long muscle and the dip of her elbow, down to her wrist and John closes his fingers there, ignores the way blood is slicking his palm. He thinks about the first time he ever touched Deanna's wrist, when it was small and chubby and the first time she closed her fingers around his thumb; he thinks about holding her hand when she was a baby, when she was small, when she got so big, and then he has to stop thinking about it before he throws up. He's looking for a pulse even though he knows there's no way there is one — the ground underneath her is soaked dark red, soaking into John's pants now, too, too much for one person, for one girl, and John knows, he knows, he knows but — but he can't stop looking, can't stop running his hands over her.

"No," he's saying, "no," because he died for her, he sold his soul for her, he went to hell for her, and whenever he'd watched her die there, he'd known it was bullshit, that Deanna was upstairs calling Sam a motherfucker and taking care of him and breathing and — he turns to Castiel.

"Fix her," he says. "Fix her."

Castiel doesn't look at John, can't take his eyes away from Deanna — her body, what's left of her, Jesus Christ — and he just says, "I don't know how this happened."

"Fuck how, who cares about how?" Sam snarls, and he gets to his feet, he grabs at Castiel's trench, hands smearing dirt and Deanna's blood, and when Sam shakes Castiel, Castiel actually shakes. "Just fix her — bring her back — "

"I can't," Castiel tells him, distracted, and he's not looking at Sam, he's looking over Sam's shoulder, looking at Deanna like something stuck a fist into his chest.

Sam's face crumbles again, like even his muscles and bones hurt to much to hold it up, to keep it together, and he just keeps clawing at Castiel's coat, keeps saying, "Please — please, it's — she's my sister, please."

"I can't," Castiel says again, a crack of lightning in the heavy air. And softer, creaking, hurt in a way John would have sworn the unbending edifice of Castiel, angel of the Lord, couldn't be, he closes his eyes, he murmurs, "It's beyond my powers."

"You — you pulled Dad out of hell," Sam says, wild. "You're an angel."

"And I knew then where your father was," Castiel hisses at Sam, eyes blazing, "where his soul was, who had it, and I had heaven's fiercest garrisons at my back when we stormed the gates of hell for him — for Deanna, I know none of these things, and — " and his voice cracks here, his voice a whisper " — and I know no one, no demon, who could have taken her, stolen her from under my protection."

And that's when Sam starts yelling, starts hollering, that familiar note of total batshit crazy-would-do-anything-no-questions-asked that John knows has led to at least one dead body before. 

"No!" Sam's screaming, "no! She's — no! You bring her back, you fix this, you — " with Castiel growling over him, and Sam's voice getting pitchier and more desperate and less coherent, guttural and begging, with all the syllables and words melting away.

John loses track of the argument, he stops listening, and he runs his fingers over Deanna's face, closes her eyes, puts his hands over her ears, because he knows she hates it when they fight, when Sam's yelling. He curls over her, he pulls her up, he presses her face into his neck and he breathes through the gold floss of her hair and he tries to wake up. He rocks himself back and forth, he threads his fingers into Deanna's, he pulls her hand up to his mouth, and he kisses the unbroken pink skin of her knuckles, sobs into her fist and prays, and prays, and prays.

***

They put her in the library.

John doesn't bother suggesting a pyre. He thinks about picking her up, about carrying her inside, but when he tries to move her, Sam goes postal. John gets the blanket from the hayloft instead and hands it to Sam, lets him wrap it around her, face gray and terrifyingly blank. He doesn't fight it. John's always known that Sam and Deanna orbited each other, that he's always watched from a distance. Sam wraps her up like a baby, picks her up like one, like she weighs nothing, and he carries her into the house, her head against his shoulder, and he hushes her like she can hear him when he puts her down, lays her across the rug in front of the fireplace.

Castiel has followed them like a ghost, just flashes from the corner of John's eyes, but John can feel him, the hugeness of Castiel's presence like an electrified blanket, muting out all the ambient noise. It kills the sound of cars on the road, the rustle of the trees, the silence is so complete and unbroken it's swallowing, it eats up everything, and John just sits in the armchair in the library and lets it eat him, too.

He watches Sam kneel over his sister, over their shared heart, and John's still because he doesn't know what else to be, what else to feel, anything to do, and Castiel flutters like a shadow, flickering in and out, and nobody says anything, everything in slow motion.

The sky goes from the swollen, overcast morning to dense heat by mid-day, and John just sits and sweats ice, hurts. God apparently hates a vacuum, and in the absence of Deanna — Jesus Christ — to lock it down and get shit done, apparently it's Sam's job, and John ain't moving anywhere, doing anything, anytime soon. So Sam gets a wet cloth, washes the blood off of Deanna's face and fingers, pats her hair clean and brushes it out. He calls Bobby and says, "Bobby, we need your help," and "Deanna's — Bobby, something got her." He calls Ellen. He calls Missouri, and John can hear her already crying when she picks up the phone, murmuring, "Oh Jesus, that poor girl, oh Jesus," and Sam just tells her, something brittle in his voice, "Don't worry, we'll get her back."

Sam stays long after it gets dark and cool, long after Deanna's gone stiff, and John wants to ask what the hell they're doing here, what the hell either of them are doing there, but then Castiel appears, a darker shadow among many, and says, looming over Sam and looming over Deanna:

"It's hellhounds."

John freezes.

Sam croaks, "What?"

Castiel drops down on his haunches, balancing on the balls of his feet, the trenchcoat pooling around him, and he reaches one hand over, hovering it over Deanna's body. Sam goes to snatch it away, but his fingers freeze midair, suspended like he can't move, and Castiel ignores him, just says, "Hellhounds — I knew I recognized her wounds."

John has never seen a hellhound. Not even in hell did he see one with his eyes, but he knows them, the way they fill up empty spaces, the way their teeth rip on his skin, through his bones, into the matter of the soul, tore at the viscera of what made him, seen their victims littering the long basalt walkways of hell. Alistair had kept a pack of them, and when hell was particularly busy, and he was particularly occupied with trying to break John, he would dispatch the dogs to do his business on the other souls in his charge. 

"Why would hellhounds — " Sam starts.

"It's also why I haven't been able to locate her soul," Cas murmurs. "My sight doesn't extend to hell when its gates are sealed."

"Oh my God," Sam croaks. "Deanna's in hell."

Castiel's eyes shutter, and his palm drops, tired, closing over the wings of her collar bones, his thumb in the divot between, like he, too, is looking for a pulse but he doesn't know how.

"Most likely," Castiel rasps. "I'm sorry."

And it surprises John more than anybody, probably, when he asks, "Why?"

Castiel's eyes, when John catches them, are cold fire. 

"I don't know," he admits. Unfolding himself, Castiel says, "But I will find out," and before he's fully standing, the space he occupied is empty again — and when John looks down, Deanna's wounds are closed over, the skin closed and unbroken, just blood smeared across white, all knitted together.

***

It's horribly fitting, in a way, that it's Sam and John who bury her. 

They pick a spot behind the house, away from the barn, where it's green and lush and the trees bow into a heart across the Carolina blue sky and dig in unbroken silence. Deanna never got to be a little girl or a young lady or anything other than the fulcrum on which Sam and John tilted, and she'd loved them anyway for it, and John feels sick, and selfish, and numb, and when they put her down into the earth — in a pine box, dressed in a pale yellow sundress she swore she didn't like that much — Sam cries the entire time, hurt, his voice cracking so badly and his knees so weak John finishes the job himself, hiding his baby girl away under six feet of reddish-brown dirt.

The next three days John drinks a lot and remembers very little. He thinks there's a fight, somewhere in the middle, where he calls Sam an ungrateful, selfish little shit and where Sam yells back that he wished Castiel was Deanna's angel, that Dad being dead was a fucking blessing and his coming back was the curse. It's shortly after that that Bobby arrives, and hell, John barely remembers any of this, just has the vague impression of Bobby dumping him into his bed, saying, "You poor, sorry son of a bitch," and taking off his boots.

He dreams about hell, dreams about Deanna on the rack, and when he wakes up to go hug the toilet he doesn't know if it's the bourbon or the fear. 

It's almost a week later by the time he comes out of it, shaken awake by Bobby, who slaps him — furious — across the face, and when John's cussing, "Jesus fucking Christ, you — " he cuts in, saying:

"Fuck your self pity, Winchester."

"Jesus, Singer," John gasps, dazed, tasting blood on the corner of his mouth. Bobby looks red-eyed, tired, and John doesn't remember him staying. He'll add it to the list with all the other things. 

He points toward the bathroom door. 

"Go get showered and brush up. It's past noon."

He does, but only because the prospect of fighting with him is more energy than it's worth, and when he staggers out of the shower, Bobby's sitting at the foot of his bed whittling a fucking stick. He tilts his head toward a stack of clothes. 

"Get dressed," Bobby tells him. "Work to do."

"Bobby, get the fuck out of my bedroom," John tells him. "If you wanna baby someone, Sam's down the hall and — "

"Sam," Bobby snarls, "has been doing some fucked up shit in your cellar, and is not down the hall." He picks up John's pants and throws them at him. "Now, as I said: get dressed — there's work to do."

***

The cellar, when John gets down there, is covered in runes, in Enochian, in sanskrit, in Latin. It's covered in Gaelic and there are, John recognizes, symbols, painstakingly copied from the old tortoise shell relics of pre-dynastic China. There're candles burning, a gas lamp humming, flashlights all over the place, a scrying dish. John tastes brittany and lavender and witch hazel burning, the smoke from rosemary, and he sees bone ash in a bowl and says, "Jesus, Sam, what the hell are you doing down here?"

"Something," Sam growls at him, and when he looks up, his face is thin with grief. None of it's in his eyes. He's always been able to shut it down, lock it away, close the door on it better than Deanna, in a way John couldn't do it at all. "Anything to figure out what did this to her."

John picks up the scrying dish. There's dredges of what he bets is grave dirt and blood in there, and he sets it back down. Somewhere in Lawrence, Missouri Moseley is writing his ass a pissed off as shit letter, John just knows it. 

"That angel said it was hellhounds," John says, and he can't keep himself from remembering the way Deanna looked, dead on the barn floor, a flash before his eyes and gut-wrenching, unforgiving, as sharp and nauseating a pain today as it was before.

Sam turns back to his book, hands preternaturally calm, but John sees the way all the knives on the tables are shifting, uneasy, and he presses his hand down on the handle of one to still its rattling. 

"Hellhounds don't act of their own volition," Sam lectures. "They always move on orders, and they don't just wander out of hell, either, someone — "

"Someone sent them after her," Castiel interrupts, there suddenly and leaning over Sam's book, his fingers trailing across the page. "This is the right summoning."

Sam swallows hard. "Yeah?" he croaks.

Castiel tilts his head, and John can't see the look that's exchanged, but hell, he can guess. The angel says, "It's not necessarily going to yield results, but it's worth a try." 

"Good to know," Sam says, mostly to himself.

"Is that why you prayed for me?" Castiel asks, brisk and barely civil, like he wants to be anywhere but this house, and John can understand that feeling, he knows it in his gut. "To check your spellwork?"

"And to see if you found anything," Sam says, hasty.

Castiel's face darkens. "I haven't."

"And to give you this," Sam says, voice strange. For a beat, John wants to ask what the hell Sam thinks he's doing, but then he sees the letter, Deanna's familiar handwriting tiny across the front, spelling out, Cas, and Sam says, "She — she left it for you."

Before John has an opportunity process whatever the fuck that means, Cas is taking the letter, and John doesn't know that he's ever seen a solemn hand before now, but Castiel's hands are solemn, and he and stares and stares at the envelope, his mouth going slack with something John knows intimately is loss. 

"Thank you, Sam," Castiel says, finally, tracing a thumb over his name.

Sam's flat-lipped smile is brittle and he nods. "Let us know if you find something."

Cas doesn't look away from the letter, but he does say, "I will," the last syllable of his words still lingering long after he's gone.

John clears his throat. "What summoning was he talking about?"

Sam shows him a book. "Here," he says.

***

John hears Sam and Bobby on the phone with Rufus, with Ellen, with a half-dozen other hunters scattered around the country. There are signs, they're saying; something's not right, something making the sky heavier and everyone nervous. Ellen says she's got a kid named Ash — "Hell of a haircut to go with that brain of his." — is finding the beginnings of a pattern in supernatural events. They've got compounding questions and no answers, and Bobby and Sam take notes and keep digging and John spends hours sitting in Deanna's room. The first time he lost one of his girls he'd been so busy trying to avenge her he hadn't grieved; this time, it's all he can do. 

His letter had said:

Daddy — 

I'm sure by now you're all trying to figure out what happened, or why I did it, or how, and I know telling you all to leave well enough alone is pointless. But I do want to say that I'm sorry for upsetting you, probably upsetting Sam. I know you probably won't believe me (and that's okay, too) but I had to do this; it was my problem, I caused it, it's my responsibility to deal with the consequences. 

I know you and Sam will fight like idiots, but please take care of each other for me.

Love, Deanna.

John's read it so many times, folded and unfolded it until the paper was soft. He keeps it tucked in his wallet, he folds it up in the pocket of his shirt. He keeps it nearby all the time. He keeps trying to find if there's a message in the words, some clue left behind, but it's just blue ballpoint pen ink and yellow legal pad paper, Deanna's familiar, crushed-tight handwriting crawling across the lines like a line of ants. He wonders what she wrote Sam, if his letter was longer, if she told him any more than she'd written to John — and Jesus Christ, John knows he's a jealous shit when he comes to Deanna — and he wonders what she had to say to Bobby, to Ellen — to fucking Castiel.

It's better than the other stuff he thinks about.

But he still thinks about it, the memory of Sam begging, his ugly, desperate crying, and Deanna small and bloody in his arms, guts spilling out, vivid and hypsersaturated. It's worse than the dreams of hell because the only thing that had kept him going, for time that seemed to arc out into eternity, was knowing that Deanna was aboveground, that she'd forget him, forgive him, eventually, because that's what Deanna does.

He can barely close his eyes before he starts remember: the rack, the screams, the peeling skin, the fire and the way after a while the coppery warm smell of blood had been good and rich, and luxurious in his mouth. But it always circles back around to Sam's face, Deanna's slack and bloody mouth, and he wakes up gasping, heart trying to tear its way out of his chest. He's back to drinking himself to sleep, and without Deanna to shuffle everything under any convenient rugs, there're empty bottles of fuck knows what bottom-shelf liquor littering his bedroom floor, hiding away in the corners of the library, where the rug now wears a dark-red stain, too, like the rest of them.

***

The forensics of the supernatural are complicated, arcane, rooted in gossip and ashes, and it takes a week and a half to get everything just right. They gather a sage stick and a dozen white candles; Sam breaks a thermometer, mixes mercury and acid and a scrap of Sam's t-shirt, stiff with Deanna's blood, in the silver cup with its grotesques along the base rolling forked tongues at John like a threat. 

When they do, they do the ritual in the library, because he can't go into the fucking barn without being wrenched by it, without still smelling the blood, feeling the dizzying vertigo. 

"You're sure this will work?" he asks, but there's no fire behind it, he can barely keep himself standing, leaning against a wall and hoping it's enough to keep him upright.

Sam, across the room, nods. "Yeah — it should summon whatever demon..." he trails off, because Sam can't bear to say it either, say, dragged her off, stole her from us.

"Most demons would leave some residue," Castiel growls, there suddenly and occupying a once-empty space by the fireplace, comprehensive in his stillness. 

John asks, "Most?"

Castiel looks wrecked, wild, and he has dark circles under his eyes, like he's losing his veneer of angelic distance. Castiel is an asshole and useless but he's an angel, for fuck's sake, he shouldn't look thinner and crazy and like he's falling apart, like he's been pulled inside out, but he does, and when he turns to look at John, he says:

"Ones that won't would be beyond summoning, anyway."

"Nice of you to finally fucking show up," Bobby spits at him, and the glance Castiel gives him could flay a man.

"Did you find anything?" Sam asks, before Castiel can do it, rip Bobby from stem to sternum, and John thinks Castiel would do it, too, just to get it out from underneath his skin. They're all particularly dangerous recently, and John tries not to think about how it might have been for his baby girl, always being everybody's emergency handbrake.

Castiel shakes his head and looks toward the windows of the library, where the leaves are rustling, lazy, on the summer-heavy trees, blanketing the ground in pale green light. 

"The gates of hell are still closed to me, and my superiors haven't answered any of my questions," he says, and he runs his hand along the edge of a bookshelf, fingers touching the spines of Deanna's Little House on the Prairie books. "I have felt no indication of her on Earth, either, in the course of my other duties."

John barks out, "Other duties? What the hell other duties do you have that — " are more important than getting Deanna out of hell, John means to say, but Castiel cuts him off, interrupts and grinds out:

"We're wasting time." He nods at Sam. "Do the ritual."

Sam does. 

They stand, all of them, in a half-moon around the arc of a devil's trap, and Bobby and John hold shotguns and holy water and Sam is holding a book — old vellum, rumored to be human skin — chanting Latin until the walls shake, the lights flicker, the daylight goes prematurely gray outside the windows. 

The space inside the house and around it shake, overfull, filled up to the brim with the heavy, dusty sweep of magic, and it always feels like someone's tickling fingers up John's spine when it happens: invasive, unexpected, unwanted, cold. Castiel just leans against the bookshelf — still tracing a copy of Little House in the Big Woods with his fingertip — and watches, utterly untouched by it, his trenchcoat and hair and everything perfectly still, the moving eye to a coming storm. 

The wind kicks up, and all the papers in the room are swirling like a hurricane, pens and glasses rattling off desks, and it's like a storm trapped inside a house except that all of a sudden everything goes quiet, goes still, and John has just enough time to ask, "Was that it?" before a sonic boom swallows all the questions in the room in a column of blue flame and something ugly and skeletal gets spat into the room, sucked out of nowhere and sprawled in the devil's trap now.

Bobby says, "What in the hell — ?"

"Stay still," Castiel hisses at all of them. "Don't move — any of you."

And they don't, any of them, because John doesn't believe in Castiel's God or any of the work that Castiel says they have for him, but there is something in his voice that is old like water in stone, like the darkest, oldest parts of a forest, the black corners of oceans no one has ever seen. When he talks, the room shakes, too, and John watches Sam freeze and Bobby freeze and watches whatever the hell it is they've summoned freeze, watches Castiel take easy, unhurried steps closer to it, his long legs eating up the length of the library floor.

John looks at the thing instead, and he stares and stares and stares until it resolves into something that looks human, a little. Hell is vivid, but hell is vast, and he doesn't remember this, whatever it was, that is bringing itself onto spindly knees, with cracking wrists and razor-sharp shoulders, skin that wraps possessively around the bone and green-gray with rot, dark, tired blood in the deep hollows between the ribs, in the well of its throat, where there should be stomach and muscle or sinew. But reflexive, John still freezes, he still feels his spine curl, he wants to look away when it looks up. He thinks, do it for Deanna, and meets its eyes only to find it doesn't have any: just black holes in a dried-out skull that seems to glow. In the yellowy light of late afternoon it looks small, unremarkable, and the whispery voice that comes out of its rattling throat hisses:

"Angel."

Castiel crosses into the devil's trap, and the thing flinches away, shuffles back on its creaking knees. The Daddy Long Legs fingers of it clicking across the library floor, nails scraping wood, catching the cheap rug fibers, dragging as it moved to get away.

"Deanna Winchester," Castiel spits at him, still advancing. "I can smell her on you."

The demon — it has to be a demon — grins, wavering, and it's a mouthful of rotted out teeth that John sees behind his shriveled lips. 

"Oh, her. She came to me special delivery, all I had to do was pick her up." He makes a wheezing noise, like a whine of regret. "Didn't even get to keep her long."

"Who?" Castiel asks, and his voice sounds like the first tremor of an earthquake. "Who sent her to you?"

"Above my pay grade," the thing hisses back.

"Where is she now?" Castiel says.

The thing laughs. "Sweetheart, I think that's above your pay grade, but oh — " it shudders, the hollows of its eyes crunching together in delight, shivers rattling its bones " — oh she's so good, angel, all the guts of her are good, and her skin, that delicious, white, wet silk on the inside of her thigh — "

The only thing that keeps John from leaping into the devil's trap, too, is Bobby's hand like an iron vice on his arm, holding him in place, hissing, "Don't you fucking think about it, Winchester."

" — and when they took her away, they took her even deeper," it hisses. "Somebody else's turn, I guess."

Castiel is unblinking, his eyes as still as the locked-tight angles of his shoulders.

"Did she make a deal?" he asks. "Did she sell her soul?"

The thing makes s spitting noise, like a cat gone feral. "Why should I — " the rest of its protest is swallowed up in a shriek, unearthly, and John can't see what Castiel did, but he's done something, because the demon on the ground has folded even more tightly into himself, its body like origami, and it huffs for breath like it needs oxygen, gasps in between saying, "No — no."

"Then how," Castiel asks, very quiet and very dangerous, advancing again, just half-steps, the creak of his cheap shoes on the floorboards and carpet a menace like John's never known something made up of so many ordinary sounds could be, "did she end up on your rack?"

The demon stops, just a beat, and in an outward gush of suicidal delight, it shrieks, its bones rattle, its skin tears, it shouts, "Oh, it was you — it's your sticky fingerprints I recognized all over her, isn't it? I knew there was something familiar about you, angel."

John freezes.

"How?" Castiel demands again. "Answer the question."

"Your little princess was a gift, angel," the demon coos at him, still rapturous. "Someone cracked the Gate. I just followed the hounds up, found her soul wandering around, beaming like a lighthouse." It rasps a laugh, and asks, commiserating, "She's awfully skittish, isn't she?"

Castiel is reaching a hand to it, eyes blazing — and John's never seen a demon scared, before, but he's seen it now, watching it shake and look like it wants to plead — when Sam cuts in, shouts out:

"Wait — how do we get her out?"

The thing on the floor flicks its eyes over, to Sam, to the source of the sound — John could beat Sam to death for being completely unable to follow simple God damn directions, ever — except the demon's mouth is going manic with a smile, and like it forgets who's in front of him, what it's stuck inside, it sways, wanting, purring:

"Oh, Allistair loves her, he'd never give her up without a fight."

John feels something hemorrhage and break in two in his chest.

He'd spent 200 hundred years in the Pit, 100 on the rack, unbroken, because he had people to live for upstairs, something to clutch at.

But John had also spent 100 years at Allistair's side, stringing people up when he'd just gotten tired of fighting, when he'd climbed off the rack and picked up the knife, and the honey sweetness of it, the dizzying pleasure of it, the memory of Allistair as he'd picked up a blade is bright and visceral and inescapable in his mind. 

"You're Castiel, right?" the thing hisses, turning back to the angel, tongue curling out of its withered mouth, and John watches Castiel tense up, his arm stretch outward and fingers freeze, just long enough for the demon to add, "She dreamt about you."

And then Castiel closes the heel of his palm over the thing's forehead and turns it to dust in a blaze of light.

***

After that, there's nothing. 

There's nothing long into that night, after Sam's exhausted himself trying to discern answers in the ashes. Nothing after they all go through all the lore again. Nothing after Sam goes hoarse and terrifies the neighbors standing in the backyard, yelling at the sky for Castiel, who doesn't darken their doorstep for days that stretch into weeks. 

There're no signs, there's nothing. Everything's quiet, so quiet it doesn't make sense, and there're no answers, still, nothing to cling to and no one to ask and John's collection of newspaper clippings turns psychotic while Sam's stack of spellbooks gets darker and blacker at the edges.

After a month, Bobby goes back to South Dakota, hushing something into Sam's ear when he hugs the boy goodbye, as Sam clutches at him too closely, hollow eyed. Two days later, Jo and Ellen roll into town, and John could kill Singer, for being a crazy old fucker, yes, but for dispatching the Harvelles, too. Ellen's hated John ever since he got her husband killed, and he understands that, but maybe she doesn't hate him that much after all, because she picks her way up the stairs and sits next to him on his bed late the first night they're at the house.

"Ellen," John says to her.

She plucks the SoCo out of his hands and looks at it, assessing. "This doesn't work."

He laughs. "No. Sure doesn't."

Ellen puts it down, far away from their feet, closes one of John's hands into her own — and his fingers feel stiff, numb, the skin wrapped around them papery and strange against his own touch — and she puts the other on John's neck. She says, "John — I'm so sorry." He tries to shove her away, but he's too God damn drunk; he hasn't slept in weeks; he's half dead, all sick, completely spent, he's got nothing left, flat out and run down, and he can't even move fucking Ellen Harvelle when she drags him into a hug.

"We'll get her back," he tries to tell her, but he's not sure all the words come out right, because Ellen just ignores him, cards her fingers in his hair, and chokes out:

"John, I'm so sorry."

He tries to blubber something at her, about how Deanna's strong, how she'll make it, how she'll be okay until they figure out how to break her out. But he doesn't mean any of it. He doesn't even really believe any of it, and at its heart none of it matters, because his baby girl is six feet under and a million miles away; her Dad and her brother can't save her; hell, an angel can't save her, and she's strapped down on a rack under Allistair's knife, and it doesn't matter if John gets her out, it doesn't matter if they do it tomorrow, in the next minute, five hours ago — it will never be okay. She will never be fine. John will never be able to save her when she's already lost, and he's not sure how it happens, but he's thinking this and thinking this and ends up on his knees in front of the upstairs toilet, sobbing and throwing up and letting it all hit him, Ellen rubbing his back.

The next morning John packs up his truck.

"Where the hell are you going?" Sam asks. "We haven't — "

John closes his eyes. "I can't just sit here," he says, and it feels funny to be talking again after so long being silent. "I've gotta do something — maybe I'll pick something up along the way."

Sam stares at him, and John knows that look on his face. That's his, Don't You Dare Make Us Move Again face. That's his, I'm Gonna Be A Lawyer face. That's his, I Hate You Because Deanna Listens To You face.

"So you're just leaving," Sam says, dully.

"I'll have my phone," John tells him. "I'll check in — "

"Fuck you," Sam interrupts, and John can tell he's been dismissed. "Just — go. Leave."

He clutches at the truck, tries to dredge up any patience, or hell, any of the anger Sam used to light in him, how the way his son tilted his head and rolled his eyes could make him furious, incandescent. He can't find any of it. John just says, "Sam, I'll call."

"Forget it, Dad," Sam tells him, flat and already disengaged. "You never did anything to deserve her before, I don't know why I thought you'd shape the fuck up now."

That doesn't stop hurting until John's already back in Kansas, parking the car in front of Missouri's house. He calls Bobby to let him know he's back on the grid, dials the first digits of Sam's number a half-dozen times before he throws the phone into the backseat.

"He doesn't mean it," John mumbles, when Missouri makes him a coffee and sits him down at the kitchen table, frowning at him.

"Oh sweetheart, you know he did," she confides, and gives him a cookie. "That's okay, we both know it's not true."

Since John doesn't know it's not true, he'll let Missouri know it for both of them, and he eats the cookie and sleeps for 12 hours before he gets back on the road.

The hunting community at large responds to John's miraculous resurfacing on the circuit with disdain and suspicion; he hadn't expected anything less, but it does make him wonder about the number of times someone sneers at him and says, "I fucking knew it," like he'd called in stuck in hell to get out of God damn work or something.

He stays in Kansas for two weeks, hoovering up three small-fry ghosts and offing one poltergeist, rapidly becoming a hazard at the local bar, before he goes west, into California, where he loiters around Napa exorcising minor demons out of winery basements and drives in the cool early mornings. When he calls Bobby, all he gets is that they haven't found anything; when he calls Sam, Sam doesn't pick up the phone. So basically, everything is pretty much the same as always, with Sam righteously furious and Bobby barely tolerant and Deanna dead and John good for fuck-all.

John's never been good at taking care of Deanna, not the way he should have been. He taught her to shoot a gun and throw a punch, how to salt and burn a ghost and take out a witch, but none of it ever helped. All the people who've really hurt her are immune to rock salt and prayer. 

Sam hates the fact that John thinks they're doing the right thing, that he won't bend enough to consider there's another way; John's never fucking thought he was doing the right thing — he's always just been doing whatever he can to try and keep his family safe, to protect Deanna, to teach Sam how to protect himself, to look after his sister the way she always looked after him: unwavering.

He's in some nowhere town in Washington state when fate comes for him again. 

John's packed it in at a run-down Motel 6 with a faulty air conditioning unit, sleeping hot and having nightmares about Deanna, four years-old, tears streaking her smokey face and their house in Kansas ever-burning. He's driven across so many states and for so many days; no matter where he goes there he is, waking up with a silent scream filling the space behind his gritted, grinding teeth. 

It's through a hot sting of tears, gathering in his eyes, that he sees Castiel in the corner of the motel room, pacing the space in supernatural silence — barely disturbing the air. 

“They are making plans,” Castiel says, his voice raked gravel.

John just blinks at him, tries to get his bearings. He feels the fibers of the shitty motel coverlet under his bruised knuckles, can taste sour mash in his mouth. “Jesus — what? Who?” he asks once he can.

Castiel stares the way John thinks cemetery statues would, if they had real eyes: accusing, unblinking, fucking terrifying. 

“The host,” he says, and without waiting for another dumb question, he adds, “I sought and was denied revelation for a second time, after I left you. I…resorted to alternative channels for information.” 

John scrubs at his face. “The hell does that mean?” 

“It means I believe that the host are making plans,” comes the retort. “And from the signs and wonders I believe they are trying to trigger the last battle.”

John hears himself repeat, “Last battle.”

“The apocalypse,” Castiel goes on, freezing now at the laminate table in the room, where John had thrown his keys and his EMF meter, dumped his wallet late last night, when the liquor had started dragging him into sleep and his hands were shaking. 

“What does that have to do with Deanna?” John asks. He remembers justifying to himself that this ghost, or this striga, or this poltergeist was more important than his daughter long ago. Now Castiel says “apocalypse” and all he can think of his little girl. 

Castiel doesn’t look up at John, he keeps staring at the table — and it takes a beat before John realizes Castiel is staring at the photo in John's wallet, spilled open: yellowed plastic over an image of Deanna at 4 years old, in jean shorts and a green t-shirt the color of her eyes. Her hair's nearly white blonde from the sun, her eyes squeezed shut from her laughter, barefoot in the grass, happy and safe and new. It's the last photo Mary had taken, a lazy afternoon picnic in the impatient days before she went into labor with Sam. In the hazy light of the room, John can see Castiel skim his fingers over the wallet, over the little plastic photo sleeve, as if he can absorb the moment by touch. 

“Over the years, our Father has anointed prophets among humankind,” Castiel tells him, never looking away from John's history, from all that they've both lost. “And a portion of their words have been collected into your holy texts — the Torah, the New Testament, the Quran, the Bhagavad Gita, the Gathas, among many others. But they are not comprehensive of the full prophecy of the end of the days.”

John rolls himself off the couch, more or less onto his feet. He swears some, and once his back and all his joints stop cracking, he asks, “And, what? She’s tied to this prophecy?”

Castiel looks away from the photograph now. He looks back up at John, and whatever tenderness had been on his face is gone.

“You know the story of the four horsemen and the tribulation days, and your human storytellers elaborated on it with visions of resurrection and peace at the other end,” Castiel says. “The version I hear whispered among the host goes differently — it ends with the peace of all humanity wiped off of the face of Earth, and it begins when the righteous man, sent unjustly to hell, gets off the rack and picks up the knife.”

John’s stomach roils, his blood rushes, and he remembers Alistair and his hounds, the endlessness of hell, the way it breathed and throbbed like an exposed organ, gore seeping into every chamber — dripping off the ceilings and into John’s flayed-open guts.

“If it was you, the apocalypse would have started already. There are 666 seals, each monitored by one of my brethren, and we would have seen them begin to break,” Cas says, impatient, interrupting. “But there's been nothing, no movement, no change — and I believe now that’s why Deanna was taken.”

“To — lure the righteous man?” John asks.

Since his resurrection, John's guardian angel has spent shockingly little time perched on his shoulder. Castiel lacks the forgiveness, the soft edges of what John's been taught about mercy, been told about faith. He's terrifying, infinite in a way that's as alien as hell had been; John's literal demons had feared Castiel — John can do no better.

So it's no shock that he finds himself shaking, finds himself cold through, when Castiel turns to pin him with his borrowed eyes, stars burning from behind the thin bone mask. 

The size and shape of Castiel's anger fills the room like it had filled that barn so many weeks ago: cosmic and limitless — the ceaseless consuming at the heart of a black hole. 

“She is the righteous man,” Castiel replies, disgusted.

He comes away from the dresser, he comes toward John, and it's with two fingers outstretched and a gutted, gutting voice, that Castiel says, "It's only her — her goodness, that once broken is a deep enough sin to trigger the end — " 

The bare touch of the angel's fingers land with the weight of an asteroid between John's eyes as Castiel tells him, voice bending the way time is bending, the way light is bending, the way fate is shattering around them: 

" — it was folly for anyone to ever believe your soul could serve as substitute." 

***

John screams and he's in hell. He breathes and he's in Chapel Hill. He blinks, and he's in Bobby's basement, his molecules still out of alignment, none of his synapses fully reconnected. It smells like sweetgrass; it's smokey like a prairie fire, and gaunt, hunched over a silver bowl filled with the deep red of old blood, Sam sits on the floor at the edge of a summoning, eyes wide as silver dollars as he stares up at John.

"I — was not trying to call you," Sam tells him, slow.

From over his shoulder, Castiel says, "Your Enochian pronunciation called for no one," and appears from nowhere with a gleaming blade in his hand, luminous and otherworldly, and says, "Move — I'll do it."

[decepti-thots]

The Transformers Fic Rec community!

With Tumblr rolling out its Community function in beta, I'm jumping in to experiment with whether it's a good platform for an old idea I had to run some kind of fic rec event/feed for Transformers. Because I miss when fic rec communities were a bigger thing in fandom!

What is it?

So first off, communities are a new Beta feature Tumblr is rolling out which allows members to post and reblog to semi-public, curated feeds here on Tumblr. (If you were around when Livejournal was a thing, or use Dreamwidth, it brings a little of the way comms work(ed) on those platforms over here.)

Posts made to the community are visible when you visit it, but don't go into the wider public search. You can comment on and react to posts, and members can reblog posts from elsewhere on Tumblr into the community. The idea is for this to be a dedicated little feed you can proactively check and post to when looking for fic recs and related discussion, somewhere between a forum and a blog feed! Slower and more public than a Discord server, but more curated and targeted than just throwing stuff out there. I also hope to start doing fic rec theme/challenge weeks on there at some point, if I can get things going!

The community will be 18+ only, due to it accepting mature and explicit fic recs. Users will need to have some kind of indication on their blog they are an adult to join. A set of basic guidelines is on the new community page as the pinned post for now and can be read before choosing to join if you like.

So how do I join?

At the moment, communities are invite-only while the beta testing continues. (They are currently working on letting admins use invite links to let people join, hopefully very soon.) This means that if you would like to request to join, you will need to send me an ask so I can add you. (Or comment on this post, or... you get the idea. You have to ask me.) In the future, you'll be able to request to join yourself. As mentioned above, this community is 18+, and blogs that do not verify you are eighteen or older will not be added. (Unless I know you, I guess? But otherwise: say you're old, please, lmao.)

Anyway. Check out the community here and if you want in, hit me up! I'll go make some example posts sometime later today or tomorrow, probably. :) Let's get the ball rolling! (And if you have any suggestions and/or feedback, let me know if you want, I'm all ears.)

[sindirimba]

okay here we go. in my current ongoing effort to support off the wall creativity in fandom, i've compiled a list of book of nile fics with unusual premises. by that i mean tropes and plots and things that aren't common, or that used to be popular but aren't any more, or that are just, to put it briefly, weird. gloriously weird.

i didn't want to spend days on this so i am sure i'm missing things. i had 35 pages on ao3 to go through so i did have to skim. if you think something's missing from this list please add it, i'm not the QUEEN.

okay, below the cut: /livejournal refugee dialect

🖤 🖤 🖤

as usual i tried to find people's tumblrs but that's not always easy. some of these have additional content warnings that aren't included here, so pay attention.

🐺 A Little Nudge - @whumpedup - werewolves and everyone's in wolf form

🏚️ The Veiled Hollow - @winterequinoxx - halloween town

📚 A General Librarian - @sweetlyenchains - fairy tale, sentient castle, arranged marriage

📰 Rhymes with Shook Her - @lady-writes - booker the hooker

🥽 Here with Me - semi-anonymous sex

💉 if we’re honest with each other - @nevermindirah - kozaks made them do it

🦭 For I Am Bound and You Are Free - selkies

🪢 Make a Haven of Me - arranged marriage / marriage of convenience

👻 I’ll Find You - ghost fic, reincarnation

🥣 Eye Candy vs Soul Food - @lady-writes - reincarnation

🪿 Announcing Your Place in the World of Things - @mprosperossprite - soulmate geese

🐙 Wrap - tentacles

👑 At Your Service - royalty/commoner(ambassador)

🕳️ Summon The Pearl Rosary And Relax (Catch This Manic Rhapsody) - @lady-writes - gloryhole

💤 Yawn - somnophilia

🎭 052. Role Playing - @aimmyarrowshigh - fake relationship

📽️ This ain't no never-neverland - @energievie & @nevermindirah - pinup/nude modeling

💥 It is only the heart that can see rightly - soulmate spark

🐁 grow how you want to - @gaal-dornick - daemons

🧿 to have and to hold; - royalty/evil queen nile

🔥 The Missing Hours - @mprosperossprite - missing scene sex

👣 leave no man behind - @ungefug - drug fic, foot job, watersports

🔥 like a charm (that fits you perfectly) - @gaal-dornick - missing scene sex

🐝 The Gift of the Body - post apocalypse fantasy

‼️ Just to please you - omegaverse but hear me out

🌌 Counting Up, Counting Down - @phatburd - future, space travel

🐙 003. Tentacles - @aimmyarrowshigh - well,

🍄 Wouf Wouf: an unredacted fairy tale - @nevermindirah - animal transformation

🚪 only have you in my dreams - @gaal-dornick - accidental voyeurism, pegging desire from guy’s POV

🦁 hey there Mr. Lion - @sweetlyenchains - werelion

🎡 Your Heart is Unbreakable - @mongoose-bite - sex work

🪦 Child of Night - @mongoose-bite - psychopomp nile

🖌️ A Ready Heart - @what-alchemy - soulmate mark

👸🏿 wonder if better now having survived - @upinyourcortex - death by sex

🖤 🖤 🖤

and hey..... what about some self-indulgence. leave me alone. i'm self-reccing:

🩸 You Come Through - period sex

🥀 You’re not my eater - sex pollen

⚉ French Knot - clones

🐈‍⬛ Don’t babysit that - burglar/homeowner, california weed

➡️ Xyzzy - interactive fiction themed

🍑 À quoi bon se bousculer? - anal sex, woman receiving

and i have to mention the venom AU that @nevermindirah and i wrote : Quit your job and become a monsterfucker. it is a WIP, i'm so sorry. but there's some fun stuff in there, so i have to 👽

from my kinktogber collection:

🧊 Creampie

🍆 Size Kink

🔫 Fuck or Die

🤰🏿 Pregnancy

📌 Monsterfucking

okay i'm done

ps: if you're like, (trope here) isn't unusual i see it everywhere! well this is all inherently subjective. but please tell me about your magical fandom land where there's a plethora of fic where a m/f couple engage in anal sex with the woman receiving. please.

[sykosixx]

july 9th 2005

(via pete wentz livejournal)

-typed out below the cut + my thoughts

i think the motto of my life could be "think negatively, when has thinking the worst ever lead to a disappointment?" late nights and even later kisses. i'm throwing writers blocks hoping to break down the wall between us just to get a word in, but inspiration has ran drier in my throat and bloodstream than the air we try to breathe in every day. in a room we decorated with "could haves" and "wanted to's", i'm with you and we're alone, but it feels like it's just me. maybe i'm just pretending you're here, it's how i get to sleep when i do get to sleep. sleep is a bad habit i'm dying to try. i don't like guessing once let alone second guessing myself. you're inches away and still out of reach. we're not even on the same page. i suddenly wish i could have been a brain surgeon just to figure out what was going on in your head. or a psychologist, just to get a glimpse.

when i can't see (through) you it drives me insane and i break at every light of your cigarette, i wanna know what you're thinking but bad news is old news. now i don't know what's thicker, the tension or my skull... but i've still memorized every possible sound you make while breathing out. i seriously can't breathe so i'll let you do it for me - a new meaning to 'you take my breath away', i don't know why it was given to me in the first place. our eyes meet and i remember and kick myself for forgetting at/it all. i'm making things up just to have more guests at my pityparty. pretending i'd be given a chance when boys like me lose them anyway. yet here i am. and there you are.

people try to figure me/you/us out, but we don't even have it down yet. they can spend hours writing up all my mistakes but the pen couldn't touch you. so you can calculate how this is all adding up and subtracting years off my life. i'm more worried about how it's dividing us apart. girls are harder to figure out than algebra - yet people still try to do it. the one thing i've found is i don't want to lose her. i'm tripping over words and falling in love. i told her i would have bought her the prettiest flowers but she'd make them look ugly in comparison. she laughed and probably figured i was just being cheap again, but i was being serious.

as far as anything else goes, i'll definitely update about it later, but this one is definitely for you. if you ever question my love i'll answer it, i love you.

xxoo

NOTE FROM AL: i think it's funny how often i see this entry overlooked. obviously it's not the iconic Fourth of July 2005 one (god even in your songs, could you be more obvious) (follow up, while looking back through PW old livejournal, i saw "i miss when people didnt know who i was posting abt in erly 2006),, ANYWAYS july 9th! 5 days after 04/07/2005, aka hes gotta still be talking about the same person ie; mikey fuckin way. "you're inches away and still out of reach." oh god the pining after this emotionally unavailable man. the "girl" stuff comes so late and looks too forced imo- anyways, you get the point, petekey 4 lyfe and better off as lover. NOT the other way around or whatever the summer of like insinuates.

idk dawgz, maybe ya boi needs 2 go 2 bed. feel free 2 refute me im too tired 4 this shit. oh yeah + i made a livejournal if any1 still uses that- it was just 2 sketch out emo losers cryptic + painfully obvioous messages but yahoo! mayb ill actually do smth w it.

[gffa]

Over the last week, I decided to go ahead with bookmarking all the fics I've recommended over the years on AO3 since I abide by tumblr poll results always (and man pour one out for all the fic that never made it to AO3 or has since been deleted, sooooo many gems lost to time!) and it was a bit more than the ~3,000 I was expecting:

Hopefully, this will be easier than browsing the hundreds of recs posts I've made, since you can filter for any of the author's tags now! These are mostly focused on Star Wars and DC fandom, but I did my time in the anime mines and occasional tours through some TV fandoms or movies. You can dig into everything unfiltered and start your own filtering, or the bigger fandoms you'll find:

MAJOR FANDOMS: Each of these should have 100+ at minimum and, in the case of Star Wars, literally almost half of them are in that fandom. Look, Star Wars fandom might be a trash fire in a lot of ways, but it is ON FIRE with some good fic. (Older bookmarks not guaranteed to match my current sentiments, especially re: the Jedi, but they did catch my fancy at that point in time!)

STAR WARS: - All Star Wars -OR- All Star Wars minus the Obi-Wan/Anakin ship - OR- Nothing BUT Obi-Wan/Anakin

BATMAN/DC: - DC can sometimes be tricky, but you can do a Batman* search and get most of them (though, sometimes Nightwing* or Young Justice* or Superman* will catch some of the others). Honestly, though, you might want to just do a search for what character or dynamic you like and have fun from there, because otherwise you're getting a face full of my Dick Grayson Is The Center Of The Universe And I'm Making That Everyone Else's Problem agenda. ;)

MARVEL/MCU: - Marvel* will probably get most of the various properties, though you may want to filter for Defenders* or Guardians of the Galaxy* if you're interested -OR- Marvel* without the Thor/Loki - These focus a lot on the Thor* fandom if you want to witness the results of like 8 years of constant voracious reading in that fandom (Minus the ship), because, seriously, I read a LOT of Odinson family fic. - Bonus, just do a search for Maximoff* to find some really good X-Men: First Class-verse because, listen, I have been ALL ABOUT the Maximoff twins since long before the movies or MCU brought them over and I will DIE ON THE HILL of "Marvel, make Magneto their bio-dad again or I'm never reading another comic of yours ever".

TOLKIEN/LORD OF THE RINGS/SILMARILLION/HOBBIT: - Tolkien* -OR- Hobbit* -OR- Lord of the Rings* searches will turn up most of my Elf-hunting, I primarily focus on the Sindar Elves, but look I can't resist my problematic Feanorian faves or that I will die on the hill that Fingolfin is the best ever. (You have NO IDEA how sad I am that so much fic on Stories of Arda or FFNET is not easily bookmarked on AO3, sob. I externally bookmarked a few of the bigger ones, but sooo many shorter faves are missing from my recs tag.)

CLAMP: - X/Tokyo Babylon legitimately bums me out because it's not a huge fandom and yet so much of what was written was pre-AO3 and lost when CLAMPesque went down or was never brought over from Livejournal, yet this fandom (well, the Seishirou/Subaru pairing) still burns brightly in my heart.

MINOR FANDOMS: Ones that probably only have under 100 bookmarks (often around the 20-30 bookmarks range), but will at least give you a place to start! ANIME/MANGA: Bleach | Cardcaptor Sakura | Dragonball | Finder no Hyouteki/Viewfinder | Katekyou Hitman Reborn! | Kuroko no Basuke | One Piece | Sailor Moon | Madoka Magica | Naruto | Princess Tutu | Trigun | Weiss Kreuz | Yuri!!! on Ice

BOOKS: Chrestomanci | Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint

DRAMAS: Nirvana in Fire | The Untamed -OR- Modao Zu Shi

TV SHOWS/MOVIES: Community | Game of Thrones -OR- ASOIAF | Good Omens | Hannibal | Highlander | The Old Guard | Our Flag Means Death | Stranger Things

VIDEO GAMES: Dragon Age: Inquisition | Final Fantasy 8 | Genshin Impact | Okami

BANDS: Arashi

All right, whew, that was actually a fun project, despite how much work it was to hunt down a lot of older faves to see if they were on AO3, hopefully you'll find this useful!

[detailtilted]

In Search of Supernatural Fans from the Early Years

Hi! I’m looking for the legends who originally recorded old Supernatural convention panels featuring Jared or Jensen, or possibly Misha. See "What I'm Looking For" below. If you know one of them, or if you're a member of a community with people who were in the fandom in those early years, I’d greatly appreciate it if you could let them know about this post. I can be reached at DetailTilted@gmail.com or here on Tumblr.

If you aren’t familiar with my project, see the “Project Background” section below. This is not a low-effort exercise to merely repackage old videos. I’m putting many hours of work into each video to improve their watchability and accessibility. I will always credit my sources unless you wish to remain anonymous.

Even if your videos are on YouTube, I’m likely to have more success upscaling them if I can get the original video files. Thanks to the videos AgtSpooky kindly sent me, I've learned how big of a difference it can make when I have the original files to work with. That's why I’m putting more effort into finding those elusive original video takers.

The problem is that they all seem to have fallen off the face of the earth. Most of their YouTube accounts, LiveJournal accounts, and whatever other accounts I’ve dug up haven’t had any activity in 10-15 years. I’ve left a few messages on some of them, but I doubt they’ll be seen on dormant accounts. I’ve also gone down some crazy and twisted Googling paths trying to find current contact info for them, but without much success. In one case I even messaged the wrong person, who was at least kind enough to reply to the psycho asking for videos to let me know she wasn't the person I'd hoped she was. Oops!

What I’m Looking For

I’ve already finished CHICON 2007, Comic-Con 2008, and CHICON 2008, so I don’t need videos from those events, but I’d be happy to try to upscale your videos for your own collection if you have some you'd like to send me.

Actually, I could use CHICON 2008 Breakfast videos if you have any. I plan to attempt to redo that video either late this year or early next year.

I’ve been trying especially hard to reach people with original video files from either LA 2009 or Asylum 3 (2009), and I’d also be ecstatic to get some from LA 2008.

Any other old con videos you’re willing to share that have Jared or Jensen in them would be awesome. I hope to get to all the old conventions eventually. I haven’t yet defined “old”, so I don’t have a specific cutoff point.

Even if you just have audio files without video, those could be helpful too.

Length doesn't matter. Both long and short videos are welcome. Maybe I won't end up using them all, but the more options I have the better. Even if I don't put your video in my final edit, it would still be used because I always listen to every single video I can find when I'm finalizing my subtitles. Each video sounds at least a little different, and sometimes just hearing the audio in a slightly different way lets me catch a subtitle I'd missed or misheard.

Also, just to be clear, it isn’t necessarily my intent to exclude Misha. I’ve watched and enjoyed many of his convention videos and I liked Castiel for the most part, especially in the earlier seasons. I’m just not obsessed with Misha like I am with Jared and Jensen, and these videos do take quite a lot of work, so I’ve been putting my energy where my greatest interests lie. I’ll absolutely be including him when he’s in panels with Jared and/or Jensen, and in the future I may consider doing some of his solo panels.

So if you have original video files of Misha's solo panels that you’d like to send me, I’d be happy to add them to my stockpile for future possible use. If your videos turn out to be mostly complete, and if they upscale easily, then I might go ahead and do his panel at the same time I do the other panels from the same convention. If they'll take more effort to work with, I’ll probably skip them for now, but I may come back and tackle them if/when I run out of old Jared and Jensen videos to work with.

For any con videos you send me, regardless of whether I use them or not, I’d be happy to try to upscale them and send them back to you for your collection. I can’t always get things to upscale, so I can’t promise success, but I’ll definitely try.

Project Background - Enhanced Edition Con Videos

You can find my videos on my YouTube channel. (If you're already familiar with my project, skip to the next section -- there's nothing new to see here.)

I started this project in December 2023 to enhance old convention videos. My goal is to make them easier on the eyes and more accessible to both new and old fans from around the world. The videos on YouTube from that time can be difficult both to watch and to understand due to a combination of the older technology used to record them, the difficult recording conditions the fans were working with, and the lack of subtitles that make any sense.

I’m enhancing the videos as follows:

Visual Improvements: I’m upscaling the videos if possible, making color corrections if needed, and adding some slight stabilization to reduce the jitteriness. The end result is far from perfect because there’s only so much that current technology can do, but it's noticeably improved if you compare it to the originals.

Subtitles: I’m adding good, color-coded, English subtitles that can be turned on or off through YouTube’s CC button. The color-coding makes it more clear who's saying what when multiple people are speaking, and YouTube can auto-translate them into other languages to improve the accessibility.

Multiple Sources: If one video has gaps in it, then I'll try to find another that I can edit in to fill those gaps so the end result is as complete as possible. If I have more than one source that captured the same portion of the event, then I'll cut to whichever video I think had the best view of the action. In a few cases I’ve added a split screen with two different videos showing simultaneously so we can see action that's taking place in two separate areas. For example, when Jared and Jensen are on opposite sides of the stage. (There were also the infernal talking head bubbles on my Comic-Con 2008 video which nearly made me throw in the towel, but taught me a lot. 😅)

Extra Content for Context: These older videos don’t take up the full width of a modern video frame, so I’ve taken advantage of the extra space to display some still images with text to add extra context for many of the things they discuss. Some things are a lot funnier, or at least a lot more relevant, when you know exactly what they’re talking about. I clarify Supernatural episode references and pop culture references among other things. Sometimes I’ve also inserted short video clips, usually just a few seconds’ worth, if I thought it would add worthwhile clarity or entertainment to the topic at hand.

Current Project Status

If anyone has been wondering how I’m doing on my current video and what’s next… I’m almost done with the last video from CHICON 2008, which was Jensen’s solo panel. I should be ready to publish it on YouTube this Friday, May 24. I plan to use the same schedule as last time and put the Tumblr post up the following Tuesday when it’s a little more likely to be noticed here.

The next sequential conventions are LA 2009 and Asylum 2009, but I haven’t had much success in my attempts to upscale the available videos. If I were to work with what I have now, I know I could turn out something better than what’s on YouTube today, but the end result wouldn’t be nearly as good as what I might be able to achieve if I can get some original videos to work with. So I think it’s more logical to skip over these conventions for now and give it some time to see if I get any responses, in hope of a better end result.

I do intend to come back to the skipped conventions eventually, even if nobody sends me anything. Once I run out of conventions for which I can upscale the videos, if I still don't have anything better to work with for the ones I skipped, I’ll just do the best I can with what’s available. Even if I can't upscale, I can still do color corrections and stabilization, plus the subtitles and extra content. Some of these panels are split up into a bunch of very short videos, so it would also add value if I can combine them into something more sequential and cohesive. (I found 130 videos from the Jared and/or Jensen panels at LA 2009, and most of them were under 2 minutes long. 🤣) I don’t know if there’s enough footage to cover the entire panels seamlessly, but I’m itching to get my hands on that jigsaw puzzle of videos to try to make sense out of them.

So… the next videos I intend to work on will be from Vancouver 2009. This is one of the conventions that AgtSpooky attended and sent me videos for and they upscaled very well. Her breakfast video had already found its way onto YouTube, but wasn't properly credited. Her main panel videos aren't on YouTube as far as I could find, so that version may be new to newer fans. I'm only just starting to play around with upscaling the other sources out there, but my first attempt at the other main Breakfast source came out well. Both breakfast videos were taken from extreme opposite angles, so that should provide some useful editing opportunities. I’d still love to get more videos of this event if anyone has them.

If you made it this far, I am in awe. Sorry for putting this wall of text on your screen! 😅

[qadmonster]

in re: Yesterday's realizations

I also realize I have a lot of old outdated ideas about art and what a career and success in art looks like. This bitterness is a sign I'm going about things the wrong way, and I have been for a while. I'm pushing when I should pull. I'm selling when I should share (granted, I'm in survival mode atm).

I think I need to broaden my horizons and temper my expectations a bit. After this is all done and the dust settles from this crumbling tower, I'm gonna beam brighter than any star in the sky.

All that said, I like making these introspective posts. Makes me miss livejournal.

[cleolinda]

A fresh pinned post: January 2025

April ETA: If something happens, look for me on:

Bluesky

Patreon (email updates, many free posts)

Dreamwidth (potentially where long posts will be)

YouTube (game commentaries)

Hello! You might remember me from Livejournal/Twitter, or you might just like what I post here. 2024 was a rough year health-wise, but we persevere. Here's what I’m doing as of January 2025:

Weekend Links: On Sundays I summarize the most interesting things I posted/reblogged that week, so check those or my archive out. Spine trouble laid me out for the second half of 2024, so those posts will return in February 2025, knock on wood. 

First look on Patreon: Mostly I’ve written about whatever strikes me, like not realizing I grew up in a haunted house, or that time The Ring nearly killed me. I have a Patreon tier where you can get longer posts—reviews, recaps, audio/transcripts and such—before I put them up here. A few things are even Patreon-only. That said, it’s primarily a free mailing list (and Weekend Links are always public), and I love having free members—so you can keep up with me no matter how many social media platforms crumble into the sea, and you can get major posts in your inbox so that you don’t miss them in the chaos of Tumblr. 

Gaming: Totally new endeavor. I fell in love with Silent Hill 2 remake playthroughs and decided to play it myself… even though I’d never played a video game before. ETA: We're five videos going on six as of May 2025! These involve gameplay, voice commentary, easter eggs, thematic discussion, and fighting Every Monster.

Varney the Vampire masterpost: I have picked up with the Varney the Vampire recaps I did on Livejournal a million years ago; after a shorter hiatus, those will return in early 2025. I am gonna be real honest with you, whenever I’ve fallen off recapping Varney, it’s because I hit some chapter of repetitive, empty dialogue where nothing happens and I don’t know how to make it interesting. We’re just going to acknowledge that from now on and keep moving. 

Perfume discussion masterpost: I got interested in perfume—the history and how it's made and wtf is "white musk"—and so I write about that periodically. I had sinus trouble throughout 2024, so hopefully I’ll be able to get back to those now. For examples of my approach, check out Guerlain’s Mitsouko, Zoologist’s Tyrannosaurus Rex, Jean Patou’s Joy, or Aquolina Pink Sugar.

Basically I just pursue whatever I feel enthusiastic about, and people tell me that they like coming along for the ride. Feel free to follow along if you’d like. 

[cloislibrary]

The Library

A curated collection of Smallville fanfiction centered on Lois & Clark. Occasionally may include Clois fic that leans into “Superman - all media types”.

Updated Daily, Monday through Saturday.

The Criteria

All stories shared here are ones I have read and enjoyed myself. I will mostly only share completed stories, but if one has not been updated in a long enough time and I believe it is abandoned, if I like it enough I will share it here with an “Incomplete” tag.

Stories will not be posted in any particular order, just as I read/discover them, or if specific types of stories are requested.

All stories posted here will be Clois endgame, pro-Clois, focused on Clois, and will be tagged accordingly if they start with another relationship (such as Clark/Lana, Clark/Chloe, Clark/Alicia, Lois/Oliver, etc).

Please feel free to ask me any questions regarding how to access a story, if I can recommend stories of a specific caliber, or if you would like to recommend me a good story/author.

The reason I am starting this blog in the first place is to bring better awareness to the large (but unfortunately scattered and hard to find) catalog of fic of this pairing. Since the show aired pre-AO3, stories are hidden away in older communities, some password protected. As a new fan, it has taken me months to figure out how to navigate multiple fan sites to try and access much of the work about these characters. I want to help more people find these wonderful works I have discovered. I also hope that sharing love and attention to some authors of yesteryear might bring some of the greats back into the fandom fold, or inspire them to share their works on AO3 for better access.

I will be sharing fics from the following sites and communities: Archives of our Own, Fanfiction.net, Divine Intervention, Red Haze, LiveJournal, and KryptonSite. If you know of any other communities with Clois fic, let me know so I can add it to my list.

Posting Rules

Schedule:

For the most part, I will post as I read a story and make a write up on it. For these first few weeks, I may post more than what will be usual to create a bit of a backlog, but on average I plan to post a fic daily Monday-Saturday, and then on some Sundays have an Author Spotlight where I interview an author and write up masterpost of a single author’s works, or a requested Masterpost where I link fics of a requested theme/trope (just send an ask!). For this, I will mostly focus on older authors whose work is harder to find, as a way to bring readers back to their wonderful catalog (and maybe encourage a few talented writers to come back into the fandom).

Browse by:

Length: Short Story (<10k) Novella (10-40k) Novel (>40k)

Season: Pre Canon | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 (Comics) | Post Canon

Era: High School Years | Young Adult “College” Years (Seasons 5-7) | Metropolis Years (8-10) | Married Years

Storylines: The Blur | Daily Planet | Red Kryptonite | Time Travel

Genre: Action | Angst | Comedy | Drama | Fluff | Horror | Mystery | Smut

Tropes: Fake Relationship | First Time | Kid Fic | Love Potion | Missing Scene | Only One Bed | Pregnancy | Slow Burn | Jealousy

Holiday Themes: Christmas | Birthday | Halloween | New Year’s | Thanksgiving | Valentine’s Day

Setting: Prime Universe | Earth-2 | Alternative Universe | Canon Compliant | Canon Divergent |

For specific episodes: Search by episode number or title. Ex: “9x18” or “Charade”

You can search for a specific type of story by combining tags and adding "from:cloislibrary" to your Tumblr search. For example, if you wanted to find a fic that is action centered, novel length, and taking place during the Metropolis Years:

#action #novel #Metropolis Years from:cloislibrary

Also, I will use tags in “AO3 fashion” even for stories that were not tagged accordingly by the author. So if you are looking for something that you assume would be tagged for the type of story you are looking for, go ahead and search it.

Cataloguing

I will post all fic with the following entries:

Link

Title

Author(s)

Publication Year (Last Updated)

Genre(s)

Word Count (Short Story, Novella, or Novel)

Rating

Season/Era

Setting(s)

Other Important Characters/Relationships

Summary (as provided by the author if possible)

Librarian Notes (if needed)*

If not otherwise stated, fic is completed.

If I find that a story is posted in multiple locations, I will provide all links for ease of access for everyone (unless it’s publicly accessible on AO3, then I might just provide that link). If you know that a story is posted somewhere I do not have listed, maybe under a different author name or title, let me know in a comment.

The Librarian

I’m new to the fandom, as I just started watching the show in late January of this year, and finished it this month after about 4 months. Before I’d even finished the show, I’d already began looking for fanfiction of our favorite comic book couple, but found AO3 pretty bare in comparison of the fandom size from the time the show was airing into today. This lead me to going down many a rabbit holes to find the stories I was looking for.

While doing so, I realized most people wouldn’t be going to the same lengths I was for the vast amount of fic hidden right outside the “mainstream” (if that word should ever be used in reference to fic) channels for fanfic we have today.

I started the show for a few reasons, 1) I caught a glimpse of Tom Welling and 2) it’s right up my alley with shows like Roswell and Buffy being some of my favorites. From what I’ve gathered while entering the fandom, is that there seems to be a bit of a renaissance happening in regards to the show, likely thanks to streaming, Talkville, and social media/edits. Knowing I was not the only one who is likely delving into the lavish and somewhat confusing land of Clois fic, made me want to start this in the first place.

Hopefully this blog can be a way we can all discover hidden gems, as well as old and new classics alike.

Since this is a secondary blog, I can’t follow/message anyone from this blog name. My personal account is @kcchameleon17 so if you see that address that’s me!

If anyone having trouble viewing a fic shared from on some of the “locked” forums, send me an ask for an explanation. (Hopefully I have one). Most only require you to make an account with an email if you hit a password wall.

Sources & Additional Resources

I will be sharing works found on Archives of Our Own, Fanfiction.net, as well as from forums/collections:

Divine Intervention: A Lois and Clark Forum

Red Haze - Clois NC-17 Fanfic Board

KryptoSite

Cloisverse - Lois & Clark Multiverse Community (LiveJournal)

Cloisfic - destinies are more entwined than they realize (LiveJournal)

Clois Fest (LiveJournal)

Iconic Lois Lane (LiveJournal)

If you are to join, comment, or interact in anyway on any of these sites, please read and follow the Rules and Guidelines section, remaining respectful at all times. Many of these are inactive communities, or ones that have a long standing culture— please be careful to be respectful if you are coming into a new space.

The Credits

All stories will be credited to their creators in each entry. I am not claiming any of the featured stories as products of my own. I’m simply acting as a fan of these works to help them reach more likeminded fans.

If you are an author whose work I’ve included in this collection and wish for it not to be so, let me know and I will remove it.

I encourage everyone to leave comments of encouragement and appreciation, kudos, etc. on the works you find through this blog, regardless of when the story was last updated or where it is located. Of course I can’t make anyone do so, but I definitely hope it happens!

Finally, thank you to all the Clois writers, past and present, who have added to the adventures of Lois and Clark.

[valyrfia]

RE: This ask on fanfic, fandom, and lestappen

(preface with, I love fanfic and fandom, and I've written for very big and small)

I have never experienced such bad fandom etiquette as I have with 1633. I wrote one multi chapter fic for the ship and 99% of ao3 comments I got were people asking when I'd publish the next chapter, which has always been a big no no in fandom. I deleted the fic because it felt bad that people didn't want to engage with what I had written, but, just ask about my update schedule. Also, people changing the date of their published fic to be more recent, so, it appears at the top of the 'recently updated page'! I have never seen this in any fandom before now! AO3 isn't Instagram! If you tag correctly, people will find your fic if they want to read it.

People are pushing 1633 constantly in very public spaces like Twitter, Insta and TikToK, where we know these drivers have accounts and look at comments/posts about them or on their own posts. Just today on Twitter I see Dan Howell (which what a fucking weird intersection of my past and current interests) being asked at a public panel about lestappen, just because he's mentioned liking F1 in the past. I know it gets easy clicks and engagement because it is popular. But, it's so far removed from behaviour that was ever considered acceptable in fandom.

I remember, back in 2013/14 there was a huge backlash to people bringing up fictional ships to actors/writers. There was discourse after every Supernatural or Teen Wolf fan forum/con panel when someone would inevitably ask about Destiel or Sterek. People would argue whether fanon and ships were appropriate to ask the real people behind the show about.

RPF is fine, I have written, currently write and will continue to engage in RPF spaces. But, there are boundaries that you must keep if you are going to engage with it. Tumblr and AO3 have always been considered locked fandom spaces. If a person goes onto these sites and searches themselves out, that's on them. But, it's implied in fandom that you keep to just these spaces or private chats

(personally, I'm sad I just missed out on the livejournal days... I got into fandom when everything was being moved over from there and fanfic.net onto ao3)

I understand younger social media users are used to an algorithm finding content for them. And on sites like Tumblr where the algorithm sucks or ao3, which doesn't have one. You have to search out the content you want yourself. Liking and kudos isn't enough, you actually have to engage in meaningly conversations and comments if you want to make friends. That can be scary! But, it's a soft skill that is slowly getting lost and with it fandom etiquette is going down the drain.

This is like...one of the last big serious ask I want to reply to on this topic because not everyone agrees with me (which, fine), but OP you put a lot of time into typing this up so I will honour that.

I think fandom, much like a lot of other things nowadays, have become less about fun and more about hitting a certain number of likes and interactions. That's why people push Lestappen on other social media even though most of us have explicitly said "can you not, thanks". The changing the date of the fic to push to an 'algorithm' infuriates me and is a personal pet peeve of mine. There's one that's doing that now on the Lestappen tag and I've point-blanked refused to read it literally BECAUSE of the date changing. People will read your fic if they want to, constantly pushing it to the top of the 'Date Updated' list does nothing except piss people off.

I will say I think the fictional ship discourse of 2014 was maybe driven in part by the fact that being gay was still seen as something much more 'novel' than even now. If we think about when marriage became legal in the US and all that...I still think though that it shows a level of self-awareness and self-regulation that we've lost in fandom. As my partner and I often to lament to each other, we've become so individualistic that people have lost the concept of shame. It's an idea that YOU are the exception and something should cater to YOU, instead of the other way round. In the case of fandom, this comes out as people acknowledging fandom etiquette in an abstract way, but still logging into their twitter account (WITH THEIR FACES ATTACHED! WHICH! THIS IS A TANGENT BUT IT BAFFLES ME! WHAT HAPPENED TO DIGITAL FOOTPRINT!) and posting about RPF. Fandom is not an abstract entity, fandom IS the people that interact with it–from authors to artists all the way to those who consume the content.

Also, I also JUST missed out on the lj days–the great migration was happening just when I was getting involved in fandom and I can't help but feel like I missed out on something special.

[olderthannetfic]

fandom social justice history anon here - aaah, thank you, early fandom being dominated by academics definitely connected the dots I was missing, thank you! Yeah, now looking at it with this in mind, it's pretty obvious how the tone of the meta essays from that era, while often snarky or even outraged, definitely sounds more like the tone of people who are used to passionately arguing in a setting that doesn't allow you to just throw whatever ad hominem accusation at your opponent's head. In contrast, tumblr's (and as a result, twitter's and tiktok's) style of fandom drama now reads to me even more blatantly like a catfight between high schoolers who have just recently learned some Big Words they only care to use as ammunition. I've read multiple older fans (including your invaluably informative blog) talking about how tumblr definitely reshaped fandom and brought in a TON of new people, and how slash was far from the "mainstream" of fandom even in the livejournal-ffn.net days, and I'm having a feeling that, for all the imperfections of this first tumblr generation of fans' activism ("let my gays marry" etc etc) the thing that got slash to be "mainstreamed" within fandom the way it currently is, also has to do with this pretty sizeable influx of new fans being mostly teenagers. As in specifically, overwhelmingly teenage girls who were having their first sparks of interest in romance during the height of the "I'm not like other girls" era + everyone shitting on twilight & "girly" musicians, because if you look at the posts from that period, they often contrast being a slash reader with being the slutty partying "other girl" or annoying hipster & at my school too slash kind of spread as a "not like the other girls" alternative to mainstream romance. Yes, not the healthiest attitude either, and it's good we've mostly grown past that, but like I said, there's a good chance that was what buffed up the numbers of slash fans to the point where today people are surprised fandom ever even was hostile to it, and at least in my environment, fandom activism, for all its flaws, was most people's first exposure to any sort of "-rights" activism at all. But (as is probably obvious) I did not experience most of even that era personally (I joined tumblr fandom in 2014). Anyways, excuse the rambling, if you feel like adding anything to confirm or deny my hypothesis, I greatly appreciate it, and I hope you have a nice day/evening!

--

M/M still isn't mainstream in plenty of fandom contexts, just not the ones I hang out in, and "not like the other girls" of the type you describe was already big in the 90s among people who'd heard of fanfic. It's just that fanfic was harder to stumble across overall.

I think the two biggest factors are the changing attitudes towards gayness in mainstream culture in a number of countries and... well... AO3 getting popular.

FFN was the big place in the past, though not for my crowd. Now, AO3 is taking a massive bite out of not only its market share but now, in the last few years, Wattpad's.

When the visible institution around which fanfic revolves puts filtering out het front and center, it sends a strong message that previous fandom platforms did not. You had your m/m-only archives and your f/f-only archives and your places that let you filter for those but that treated het as an unmarked default.

Look at early discussions of AO3. There's an undercurrent there that we all assumed it would be one of a number of archives and that we didn't expect it to get this big.

Nobody could have foreseen the Het-Is-Eternal-Default Wattpad crowd being forced by their own platform's suckitude to come camp on the thing built by slashers. Now, we are the admins and they are the also-tolerated. That never happened before.

The thing that makes people not report gay hand holding as evil porn that must be eradicated is simply AO3 putting its foot down.

Anyone who thinks that virulent slash hate is gone just hasn't looked at other spaces.

This is not about individual fans behaving better: it is about institutional power.

[blubberquark]

Are Game Blogs Uniquely Lost?

All this started with my looking for the old devlog of Storyteller. I know at some point it was linked from the blogroll on the Braid devlog. Then I tried to look at on old devlog of another game that is still available. The domain for Storyteller is still active. The devblog is gone.

I tried an old bookmark from an old PC (5 PCs ago, I think). It was a web site linked to pixel art and programming tutorials. Instead of linking to the pages directly, some links link led to a twitter threads by authors that collected their work posted on different sites. Some twitter threads are gone because the users were were suspended, or had deleted their accounts voluntarily. Others had deleted old tweets. There was no archive. I have often seen links accompanied by "Here's a thread where $AUTHOR lists all his writing on $TOPIC". I wonder if the sites are still there, and only the tweets are gone.

A lot of "games studies" around 2010 happened on blogs, not in journals. Games studies was online-first, HTML-first, with trackbacks, tags, RSS and comment sections. The work that was published in PDF form in journals and conference proceedings is still there. The blogs are gone. The comment sections are gone. Kill screen daily is gone.

I followed a link from critical-distance.com to a blog post. That blog is gone. The domain is for sale. In the Wayback Machine, I found the link. It pointed to the comment section of another blog. The other blog has removed its comment sections and excluded itself from the Wayback Machine.

I wonder if games stuff is uniquely lost. Many links to game reviews at big sites lead to "page not found", but when I search the game's name, I can find the review from back in 2004. The content is still there, the content management systems have been changed multiple times.

At least my favourite tumblr about game design has been saved in the Wayback Machine: Game Design Tips.

To make my point I could list more sites, more links, 404 but archived, or completely lost, but when I look at small sites, personal sites, blogs, or even forums, I wonder if this is just confirmation bias. There must be all this other content, all these other blogs and personal sites. I don't know about tutorials for knitting, travel blogs, stamp collecting, or recipe blogs. I usually save a print version of recipes to my Download folder.

Another big community is fan fiction. They are like modding, but for books, I think. I don't know if a lot of fan fiction is lost to bit rot and link rot either. What is on AO3 will probably endure, but a lot might have gone missing when communities fandom moved from livejournal to tumblr to twitter, or when blogs moved from Wordpress to Medium to Substack.

I have identified some risk factors:

Personal home pages made from static HTML can stay up for while if the owner meticulously catalogues and links to all their writing on other sites, and if the site covers a variety of interests and topics.

Personal blogs or content management systems are likely to lose content in a software upgrade or migration to a different host.

Writing is more likely to me lost when it's for-pay writing for a smaller for-profit outlet.

A cause for sudden "mass extinction" of content is the move between social networks, or the death of a whole platform. Links to MySpace, Google+, Diaspora, and LiveJournal give me mostly or entirely 404 pages.

In the gaming space, career changes or business closures often mean old content gets deleted. If an indie game is wildly successful, the intellectual property might ge acquired. If it flops, the domain will lapse. When development is finished, maybe the devlog is deleted. When somebody reviews games at first on Steam, then on a blog, and then for a big gaming mag, the Steam reviews might stay up, but the personal site is much more likely to get cleaned up. The same goes for blogging in general, and academia. The most stable kind of content is after hours hobbyist writing by somebody who has a stable and high-paying job outside of media, academia, or journalism.

The biggest risk factor for targeted deletion is controversy. Controversial, highly-discussed and disseminated posts are more likely to be deleted than purely informative ones, and their deletion is more likely to be noticed. If somebody starts a discussion, and then later there are hundreds of links all pointing back to the start, the deletion will hurt more and be more noticeable. The most at-risk posts are those that are supposed to be controversial within a small group, but go viral outside it, or the posts that are controversial within a small group, but then the author says something about politics that draws the attention of the Internet at large to their other writings.

The second biggest risk factor for deletion is probably usefulness combined with hosting costs. This could also be the streetlight effect at work, like in the paragraph above, but the more traffic something gets, the higher the hosting costs. Certain types of content are either hard to monetise, and cost a lot of money, or they can be monetised, so the free version is deliberately deleted.

The more tech-savvy users are, the more likely they are to link between different sites, abandon a blogging platform or social network for the next thing, try to consolidate their writings by deleting their old stuff and setting up their own site, only to let the domain lapse. The more tech-savvy users are, the more likely they are to mess with the HTML of their templates or try out different blogging software.

If content is spread between multiple sites, or if links link to social network posts that link to blog post with a comment that links to a reddit comment that links to a geocities page, any link could break. If content is consolidated in a forum, maybe Archive team could save all of it with some advance notice.

All this could mean that indie games/game design theory/pixel art resources are uniquely lost, and games studies/theory of games criticism/literary criticism applied to games are especially affected by link rot. The semi-professional, semi-hobbyist indie dev, the writer straddling the line between academic and reviewer, they seem the most affected. Artists who start out just doodling and posting their work, who then get hired to work on a game, their posts are deleted. GameFAQs stay online, Steam reviews stay online, but dev logs, forums and blog comment sections are lost.

Or maybe it's only confirmation bias. If I was into restoring old cars, or knitting, or collecting stamps, or any other thing I'd think that particular community is uniquely affected by link rot, and I'd have the bookmarks to prove it.

Figuring this out is important if we want to make predictions about the future of the small web, and about the viability of different efforts to get more people to contribute. We can't figure it out now, because we can't measure the ground truth of web sites that are already gone. Right now, the small web is mostly about the small web, not about stamp collecting or knitting. If we really manage to revitalise the small web, will it be like the small web of today except bigger, the web-1.0 of old, or will certain topics and communities be lost again?

[aziraphales-library]

Lost Fic #170

1. Hello! This is probably a bit vague so I apologise for that, but I've had a fic scene stuck I my head for some time and can't find the fic where I read it. I remember that Crowley and Aziraphale were in the Bentley, Crowley was speeding as usual, and either the Bentley was playing or Crowley was singing lyrics from "There Is a Light That Never Goes Out" by The Smiths. Specifically the part about the double-decker bus. I think part of the song were also spread across the fic to match the mood/scene, but I'm not 100% sure. I'm also mostly sure I read it before the pandemic, so it's should be from before February 2020, if that helps. Again, sorry if it's a vague request! - @dumpster-connoisseur

2. Hello, I'm hoping you can help me find a fic I thought I had bookmarked? I believe it was posted on LiveJournal or a similar site, definitely not Ao3. Post the book/season 1, A&C just started a relationship, they're both asexual. A succubus impersonates Aziraphale to trap Crowley in a demon trap and then goes to Aziraphale pretending to be Crowley to try to sleep with him and suck out his life force. Aziraphale drops a piano on him when he realizes it's not Crowley. Y'all are amazing, tysm! - @idontremembershippingthis

3. Hi! I'm looking for a fic I read some years ago, it was definitely after season 1, not book canon. It was rather mature or explicit. This fic followed Crowley throught the ages and how he wasn't able to lose his virginity, sometimes he even had a mission from Hell and Aziraphale had already sleep with that person in order to help Heaven. We get closer to our timeline and Crowley meets a guy he likes and thinks this would be the time but I think his father had an accident and Crowley did the right thing and let him go to the hospital. I think there were some miracles involved, I'm not sure. Aziraphale finds out about this and lovemaking happens. - anon

4. hello! i need help, please. do you, perhaps, know the ao3 fanfic where everyone was trying to set up aziraphale and crowley, many things happen, they get locked in some room with a window so everyone can snoop on them, crowley turns into a snake because he doesn't want to talk about their relationship, all to know that they were already together by that time and they wanted to make a little jokey joke to their friends so they acted like they still had unresolved tension with each other. thanks! - anon

5. hello! been thinking about an outsider pov fic, and i just cant find it. its from the perspective of some people on some sort of paranormal investigation website who all take it way too seriously looking into the bookshop. one scene from it i remember quite vividly is a lady going in with a bible, saying prayers as she walked around and sprinkling holy water everywhere with her just narrowly missing hitting crowley with it. she is promptly kicked out. id be very glad if you knew its name - anon

If you know any of these fics please include the number in your reply! Thank you :)

- Mod D