#this fic was a vibe i love it very much

[amelia-yap]

The sound of White Rose by @powertaco

[tokruta]

I can’t explain why, but this is my favorite hilson edit ever and I can/will watch it on loop for an uncountable amount of times

[little-mouse-adventures]

A Timeline of Events in the Artemis Fowl Series

If anyone's interested, I did do an actual analysis for where I pulled some of these dates from. But because I cannot type succinctly to save my life, it's 5,000 words long, so that's below the cut. I also put the timeline there again, but in three separate images, so hopefully they load well enough to be fully legible if the above isn't.

A thousand thanks to @sadbitchapologist and @zahnie for their help and advice with this, despite neither of them having any more than the barest interest in the series and therefore having no clue what I was on about. Thanks also to @orangerosebush for fielding completely out-of-the-blue questions about the French school system, so I didn't have to attempt to navigate web search results to figure out what mandatory gym classes were like for the sole purpose of plotting Luc's birthday on here.

An Analysis of the Timelines in the Artemis Fowl Series

A Brief Introduction

The Artemis Fowl series is made up of eight books covering a range of years and events. I wanted to see how accurate the timelines present in the books were, as well as try and plot out some other details implied in the novels but not explicitly stated, to have a better understanding of the overall world-building. To that end, I went through the series and made the above timeline. I colour-coded it based on the relevance of the specific items to certain categories, namely Humans, Fairies, Villains, and the Series itself. This does mean that some things could have fit into multiple categories. For instance, you will see some items involving Opal categorized as Fairy-Specific (such as her college years, as those are fairly neutral to the main plot or her villainy), Villain-Specific (such as her setting up her emergency fund, as that is mostly related to her schemes as opposed to relevant to her existence as a fairy, or part of the main plot of the series), and Plot-Specific (such as her opening the Berserker Gate, the primary plot point for the final book).

Before we really delve into things though, we should establish the baseline assumptions I was working with. Firstly, I am only using the original series. I have not used anything written in The Fowl Twins trilogy, given that those books seem to ret-con a considerable amount of the original information, and that is far too many headaches to give myself. Any supplemental series information, such as the short stories found in The Artemis Fowl Files, or anything from interviews is also not included. The premise here is: using just the original books, what is the event timeline of the world? The second thing we need to establish is that I am using the North American releases of the novels. I did make notes on where each bit of information comes from, but there isn’t really a citation style for this kind of thing, so I’m not sure how relevant that is. The third assumption is that the first book takes place the year it was originally published. According to my copy, the original publication was 2001, with the first American paperback edition coming out in 2002, and the first mass market paperback being released in 2003. This means our starting point is in 2001.

For sake of clarity, this analysis will start with setting the dates of the books and continue on from there.

The Basics of The Books

With that out of the way, let’s talk about the first book, Artemis Fowl (AF). It is actually not until the very end of the book that we get a solid answer for when it takes place. It’s only in the last few pages of the novel that Angeline Fowl leaves her attic room after all the plot points are tied up and announces that it is Christmas Day. This might be cause for concern – Angeline had not previously been established as a particularly reliable narrator – but given that we are asked to believe that Holly’s ‘feel better’ mood booster worked, and that neither Butler nor Artemis balk at or question the pronouncement that is Christmas Day, we’ll accept that it’s true and move on. This means that, with Butler’s earlier announcement that he was stuck doing four months of stakeout, we can say with a fair amount of certainty that Artemis obtained and translated the Fairy Book in September 2001, and managed to capture a fairy in December of the same year.

Moving on to Artemis Fowl: The Arctic Incident (TAI), we are given a decent chunk of information, albeit spread out a bit. The first is the announcement that the ransom drop for Artemis Fowl I is to be held on the fourteenth. The fourteenth of what, you might ask? Well, we are told that Artemis is currently thirteen years old. Clearly, things are past September 1, 2002 (we know Artemis’s birthday is September 1 based on information in both the fifth and seventh books). We are also told that Luc Carrere has been trading with the goblins for six months, starting in July. That puts us in either December or January, but we can narrow it down further since Artemis gives us another helpful clue. He mentions they are not expecting to see the dawn while attempting to rescue his father in the Arctic. There are only a few latitudes on Earth where polar night (of any type) occurs, and at Murmansk, polar twilight occurs between December 10 – January 2. Combining all of this, we learn that TAI takes place December 14, 2002, give or take a few days to either side.

This can be corroborated by information in Book 3, Artemis Fowl: The Eternity Code (TEC). After Holly heals Artemis Senior, we are told that it takes over two months for him to wake up. Since we are specifically told two months, as opposed to two and a half or three, we can conclude that the events of TEC take place in March 2003. Mulch gives us some information that confirms this. He was living in LA “less than four months ago,” and since he was conscripted to help with the events of TAI in December, a March plotline fits the bill. We are given further confirmation as well: Spiro mentions that Artemis will be fourteen in six months. A specific date for Artemis & Co.’s attack on Spiro’s Needle can be pulled from the throw-away line that Pex and Chips are “burying” Mulch on the full moon. A quick web search tells us that the full moon in March of 2003 takes place on March 14, and the rest of the events in the novel take place roughly two days to either side of that.

In Artemis Fowl: The Opal Deception (TOD), the fourth book in the series, we are given several very clear indications of when the events take place. Firstly, Artemis is contemplating that at fourteen years and three months old, he is the youngest person to successfully obtain The Fairy Thief. Based on previously noted details that his birthday is in September, the events of TOD must take place in December of 2003. Additionally, we are told that things are the middle of winter and Opal has been in a coma for eleven months and counting as of the end of TAI, another December plot.

Artemis Fowl: The Lost Colony (TLC) requires the most math and interpretation so far to figure out when it takes place. We know Artemis is still fourteen, so the main events clearly happen sometime between January 2004 and September 2004. Beyond that, we are using a fair amount of context clues. Artemis and Butler have evidently been traveling for four months looking for demons, so we are dealing with events in at least May. But that still leaves us several summertime months to work with, so to establish a timeline here, we will need to look forward a bit. In the sixth book, Artemis Fowl: The Time Paradox (TTP), it’s noted that Artemis is not yet fifteen, and has, on multiple occasions, spent the full moon in the study. Ergo, he’s spent at least a few months back from Hybras. If he has been back for two months and not yet turned fifteen, he would have had to have returned by July at the latest, and since he returns almost three years later than he leaves, we are looking at him returning in either May or June. This would have him disappearing to Hybras – and by extension, dealing with the earlier events in the book – in June, July, or August. After his conversation with Minerva, he notes to Butler that they “are planning a June wedding,” which wouldn’t make sense to say if they were currently in the month of June. From all of this, we can extrapolate that the first three-quarters of TLC take place in late July or early August 2004, with the triumphant return of our intrepid heroes occurring in June 2007.

As previously stated, TTP mentions that Artemis is still not fifteen, but is nearly there. He has also been home again for at least two months. This would put the events of the sixth book in August 2007. At least, the events set in the current time period. TTP does bring back time travel, and with it some problems. We are told that Artemis and Holly jump back nearly eight years to Artemis being ten and trying to fund searches for his missing father. This would put the events of the past in early 2000. However, other details presented regarding Artemis Senior’s disappearance, which we will discuss later, make that impossible. Artemis also admits, in TEC, that he was eleven when his father disappeared, not ten. If we take a bit of creative license with our interpretations and base the time-jump to the past on other presented information as opposed to the dates given in TTP, we can say that Holly and Artemis instead return to early 2001. This lines up with further details, such as the sinking of the Fowl Star (as calculated a few paragraphs down in this analysis) occurring in December of 2000, and the textual confirmation in TTP that it’s barely two months past that sinking when Artemis brokers the deal(s) regarding the silky sifaka lemur. Since, at the end of the day, the time jump impacts very little in the grand scheme of things, and the year 2001 actually fits in better with other textual evidence and events, that’s what I’m going with for this timeline.

The seventh book, Artemis Fowl: The Atlantis Complex (TAC) gives us a very helpful base point! It takes place on Artemis’s fifteenth birthday, September 1. From our previous results on setting dates for book events, that would be September 1, 2007. The sections in which Butler and Juliet are fighting mesmerized wrestling fans and meeting up with Mulch are noted in the novel as happening “the day before,” which would fall on August 31, 2007.

Artemis Fowl: The Last Guardian (TLG), the eighth and final book in the series, creates some problems. If we assume that Artemis starts receiving treatment for his Atlantis Complex immediately after diagnosis in TAC¸ that would put him receiving treatment in September 2007. We are told he is certified as cured after six months. Yet we are also told that the rest of the events of the book take place in the week or so leading up to the Christmas holidays. Everything so far has said that the Artemis Fowl series follows the current calendar, in which case there is no way that six months can fit between September 1, 2007 and December 25, 2007. However, the only reference to Christmas is in two lines noting that the Fowl parents were planning on holidaying with their children on a foreign beach. If we simply say that six months have passed, and they are instead planning on spending the Irish school system’s spring holidays in the French Riviera, everything else lines up much better. So that’s what I’ve done. This would also put the resurrection of Artemis, after the events of the book and a further six months have passed, at roughly September of 2008. There is a pleasing symmetry to Artemis being born and then re-born in September, though if you want to get really technical and say the events of TLG take place during the 2008 March full moon as Opal claims (as noted in another web search as March 28), a six-month wait time for the clone to grow would put the resurrection in October. Still, there is something to be said for having a boy’s ghost haunting a clone of himself close to All Hallows. Since it’s the last plot point of the series, you can choose which you’d like; it doesn’t have to lead to anything else after it.

Let’s Talk Timelines: The Beginning of the Line to The End of The 19th Century

Now that we have our baseline book time periods established, we can get into the math used to determine some of the events in the timeline above. Several events are easy; we are given specific dates for them. Turnball Root meets Leonor in 1938, Juliet wins the Miss Sugar Beet Fair beauty contest in 1999. Other things are based on some basic math, such as Artemis claiming his parents got married fourteen years prior to AF¸ putting that event in 1987.

The majority of the items on the above timeline, however, do take some mathematics, extrapolation, and interpretation to plot out. To try and keep everything organized, we’ll start at the far left of the timeline, and work our way forwards, looking at events oldest-to-newest to explain why they are where they are on the graph. I won’t be getting too in-depth on everything in the graph, since I’m not sure how relevant the notes on the very minor side characters such as Carla Frazetti are, but I’ll at least try to touch on some of the more relevant points.

To start with, the Battle of Taillte was noted in the 2000’s as being ten thousand years ago, putting that at 8000 BCE. Similarly, the last dome breach at Atlantis was apparently eight thousand years ago in the 2000’s, so that would be 6000 BCE. Troll sideshows were legal in the early middle ages, which implies they were not legal after that. A quick web search says the early middle ages ended around 1000. The first crusades were in 1096-1099, and as those crusades are the start point of the Butler-Fowl working relationship, a point for noting that comes next on the graph.

From there, we get into more modern – relatively speaking – events. Briar Cudgeon and Julius Root are noted as attending the LEP Academy together and being raised in the same tunnel, as well as having about 600 years of history together. If one assumes “being raised in the same tunnel” is similar to the human equivalent of “growing up in the same neighbourhood,” we can assume the two were born roughly 600 years ago, in the 1400’s. Vinyaya is portrayed as being of a similar age to Root, so her birth can also be put in the same general era. We are also told that Fowl Manor was originally a castle built in the fifteenth century, that in the early 2000’s the theories of timeline corruption were first introduced over five centuries ago, and that cloning has been banned for over five hundred years, so those three events are also tossed into the 1400’s.

Julius Root is noted as doing his LEP basic training 500 years ago in Ireland, so that would have to be in the 1500’s. He would have attended the Academy before then, putting that in the mid-to-late 1400’s. As previously stated, he was in the Academy with Cudgeon. Opal also met Cudgeon in college, and competed with Foaly for science prizes there, so they were all in school at the same time.

Mulch now enters the picture. We aren’t ever given a specific age range for him, but we are told about his career. He has, apparently, spent three centuries in and out of prison after a couple centuries of success as a thief. This would make him at least five hundred years old. There is a brief mention that he tried the athletic route at college before becoming a thief, so he would have to be an adult at that point, putting his age at roughly 550 years during the events of the series.

We then enter a period filled in from one-off lines throughout the series, presumably added to give some depth to the world. Things about the wine cellar at Fowl Manor being a seventeenth century addition, Captain Eusebius Fowl and his crew dying in the eighteenth century, and Mulch first faking his own death over two hundred years ago.

Time Marches On: The 20th Century

There is nothing of much relevance to linger on between the 1550’s and the 20th century, so we’ll jump ahead to the 1900’s, when we have Holly Short’s birthday. She is in her eighties during TLC, and her father died “over twenty years ago” when she was “barely sixty” as of TAI. Based on that, she would have been in her early eighties in 2002, putting her birthday sometime in the 1920’s. What a doll.

A few more birthdays now appear, and we’ll ignore, for the most part, some of the irrelevant ones. I don’t think we are at all concerned with Gaspard Paradizo’s birthday, or Mikhael Vassikin. We are, however, rather more interested in Jon Spiro, Domovoi Butler, and Artemis Fowl I.

Jon Spiro enters the series in TEC, as a middle-aged American. A quick search on the Internet says that middle age is generally noted as being between the ages of 40 to 60. We are told that Spiro has worked in three main industries over the past two and a half decades. Additionally, we are told that law enforcement has been “trying to put [him] away for thirty years.” If we assume he entered the working world at twenty, spent five years developing his professional self, and then started going down a path of questionable legality to get the police after him, that would put him at fifty-five in 2003, and born in the late 1940’s.

It was a bit easier to determine Domovoi Butler’s age, and we can get more specific with his actual birthday. We are told that he is forty at the start of TEC, and he is still forty during TOD. From that, we can assume his birthday is not between March – December, which means it has to be between January – March. Now, we can just leave things there, but contextually, Butler says in late March 2003 that “a lot of people know [him] as a forty-year old man.” Since I doubt he’s the kind of person who introduces himself by announcing that his birthday was last week, we can assume that his birthday is not in March. Since about half the books in the series take place in December, and there is never any mention of Butler’s birthday coming up soon, we can likely assume it isn’t in January. We can therefore conclude Butler was born in February, 40 years before 2003, which puts his birth year in 1963.

We then have Artemis Fowl I. This one took the most extrapolation to determine. We know he has run an ethical empire for a few years as of 2007, which coincides with his return to his family after being kidnapped by the Mafia. He apparently ran a successful criminal empire for two decades before that, though, so in 2007 he has been working for at least 25 years. Based on the interactions he had with his own son, I’ve assumed he was also taught to take over the family business from a young age. If he started working at his age of majority at 18 (as possible in the 1980’s in Ireland, based on a web search), we can assume he was born in roughly the mid 60’s.

Billy Kong, born Jonah Lee, is one to touch on. He plays a large role in TLC, during which we are given possibly the most backstory of any villain in the series. He was evidently born in the early 1970’s, and was eight years old in the early 1980’s. Mathematically, that can only lend itself to so many birth years, so it’s easy enough to put his birthdate somewhere in 1973, and his brother’s death date in 1981.

While we’re here, let’s talk about the 1980’s. A lot of things happen in the 80’s, so we’ll be here for a few paragraphs. Butler would have graduated Madam Ko’s Academy in the early ‘80s, Artemis I would have started working in his family’s business and stolen some warrior mummies (of note, the theft is only noted as being in Artemis Sr.’s “gangster days,” but if you are a young, rich criminal, you’d likely commit a wild theft in your early years as opposed to your thirties, which is why this is put in here). Additionally, in the mid 1980’s, Holly graduates the LEP Academy and her mother dies, as noted in TTP when she is contemplating missing three years of her friends lives.

Butler would have started his five-year stint in Russia with an espionage unit in the mid-to-late 80’s, and become a big brother in 1985. Juliet is noted at being four years older than Artemis in AF in 2001, and he is twelve then, making her sixteen at the time. We can extrapolate the month from TEC, wherein she is apparently eighteen when she is called regarding her brother’s apparent death. At the time, we are told what gifts she received for her birthday, implying it was fairly recent. Additionally, Artemis was only thirteen at that time, which would make Juliet five years older than Artemis. If, however, we trust that acolytes at Madam Ko’s start their training on their tenth birthday and get one chance to graduate per year, it would make sense for that one chance to be on their birthday, or within a day or two to allow for as much training time as possible. Since Juliet was in the midst of this one graduation evaluation when she gets the phone call and joins the crew for the March heist at Spiro’s Needle, she’d have to be born in March. (We can also corroborate this with some details from AF: if AF  takes place in mid-September, that would be just after Artemis’s birthday, which puts the 4-year age difference back into play.)

Spelltropy begins for the People in 1987, if it appeared 20 years ago from 2007. Artemis I and Angeline Fowl would get married in 1987. They would have their first child, Artemis Fowl II, in 1989, as calculated by Artemis being twelve during the initial siege of the Manor in December 2001. Artemis II’s grandfather was noted as having been dead for over ten years at that point, and it was mentioned in TEC that Angeline married her husband before he really took over the family business, so those events would likely happen when Artemis was but a baby in 1990.

The ‘90s are a period where a lot of things are happening, but few are particularly important. Spelltropy has a cure found, Minerva Paradizo is born, Juliet begins her bodyguard training and her brother refuses to let her shave her hair. These, and other events in the 90’s, are mostly calculated by math along the lines of “Event A happened X number of years ago,” but since the 90’s was mostly a time of worldbuilding events rather than plot events, we’ll just skim over the specific details.

‘You Are Here’: The 21st Century, and Where The Storytelling Begins

Welcome to the 2000’s! The kick-off point of not only the 2000’s, but also the entire series, is the sinking of the Fowl Star. We aren’t given a specific date for this, but we are given enough information to extrapolate the date. Specifically, in September 2001, in AF, we are told Fowl Sr. has been missing for almost a year. In TAI, in December, we are told he has been missing for almost two years. That does have the potential to have the ship go down in either December or January, so we need to use a bit more details from TAI to make a final determination. Mikhael Vassikin and Kamar were told to dump Fowl’s body in the Kola if he didn’t wake up in “another year,” so they’ve been looking after him for one at that point. Fowl Sr. wakes up two weeks before the deadline, and as noted earlier, the ransom drop for him takes place December 14, after he has been awake for perhaps a week. From that, we can tell that the deadline for “another year” was mid to late December, putting the initial sinking of the Fowl Star in late 2000.

The analysis gets a bit confusing at this point, because 2001 is when future Artemis and Holly join the party via time travel, as well as having their regular selves in the timestream. Essentially, we’ve established the timeline for the events of TTP above, so we know the whole lemur fiasco takes place in March 2001. Artemis wakes up at the end of that book thinking about fairies, which ties in rather neatly to him then dragging Butler across three continents for six false alarms (with an assumed approximate 3 weeks between each jaunt) before striking metaphorical gold in Ho Chi Minh City in September. During their time-traveling, Holly also gets a chance to talk to Root, who wonders why she isn’t in Hamburg, which was noted in AF as Holly’s first major failure as a Recon officer and was nearly preceding the events of AF. The time-traveling would also mean that Opal would have had to harvest her DNA for future diabolical plans before March 2001, when her younger self travels to the future. Since it takes up to two years to grow a clone to adulthood, and her clone has to be ready in September 2003, we are a few months off in the time requirements, but really, for a practice that’s been outlawed for 500 years, I can offer a bit of leeway.

We are now well and truly in the thick of the main events of the series. Most of this will be tied into the initial assessments we made way at the beginning of this essay, where we established when each book occurs. Because of this, we aren’t going to spend time on anything plot-related. However, a brief note on Turnball Root and Artemis’s Atlantis Complex is likely in order. Artemis was, as previously stated, dealing with his return from Hybras and the after-effects of stealing magic during July and August of 2007. His Atlantis Complex, and Turnball Root’s plan to escape the Deeps prison, are in full swing in September of that year. We have a brief note in TAC during the evacuation of Atlantis, that Turnball had, a month before, spied on Artemis and noted his Atlantis Complex developing. Therefore, Artemis’s Complex likely came into play in late July or early August 2007. This is close enough to Artemis’s magic theft to make sense for the deterioration of his mental health, and enough time for Butler to have started to notice something was wrong, as he did. We can therefore assume that Atlantis Complex, at least in the case of magic-stealing humans who have a propensity for time travel and getting involved in supremely complicated and improbable plots, develops relatively quickly.

This leaves just one major discussion point from the last few books: the age of Artemis’s twin brothers, Beckett and Myles. The twins are first introduced at the very end of TLC. They are written as being two during the events of TTP, three during the events of TAC, and four during the events of TLG. Regardless of the time-traveling shenanigans of their elder brother, it is impossible for the twins to age two years in the eight months between Artemis’s return from Hybras in June 2007 and the finale of the series in March of 2008, so we need to look at what makes sense.

Myles has already potty-trained himself, and done so at fourteen months, so they must be at least that old. Their other behaviours would make sense for them to be two in TTP. Diapers are still a part of their lives, and their language and vocabulary fit what a two-year-old would have, at least in Beckett’s case. Since Artemis was surprised by their existence, it doesn’t seem likely that  Angeline would have known she was pregnant, or at least not have told Artemis yet, when he went to Limbo. Ergo, they can’t be any older than two, since (one would hope) Artemis would have noticed his mother’s pregnancy if the twins were any older.

Additionally, in TLG, we know Artemis gave his brother a birthday present, so he had to have been around during the twin’s birthday at least once. With this fact, the twins cannot be born between March – June, which just leaves the question of when are the twins born?

 The most logical answer is February 2005. If Angeline was early on in her pregnancy, say six weeks (which is when most women start noticing symptoms), when Artemis disappeared in July 2004, she wouldn’t necessarily have told him yet. Then, if we assume that since most twin births occur around the 35-week mark, that would math out to having the twins be born in February of 2005. Fast forward, and they would turn one in February 2006, and two in February 2007, which puts them at the correct age for the events of TTP. [One could argue, of course, that a twin pregnancy in an older woman (unfortunately, there is nothing in the series to indicate Angeline’s age) and in a woman already dealing with significant stress could result in a very premature birth, thereby voiding any of this math and leaving the whole question of the twin’s birthday unanswered. However, since I’d rather not subject the Fowl parents to the strife and misery of having one son missing and presumed dead, and their younger children in the NICU with a low survival rate, I’m working with the assumption that the pregnancy was a healthy and normal one.]

The brief comment from Juliet in TAC about the twins being three can be passed off by them being a little over two-and-a-half and Juliet not being around as she is touring in Mexico. By the time TLG takes place, in March of 2008, the twins would have had their third birthday, allowing for Artemis to give Myles his chair as a birthday present, Beckett to be old enough to no longer need diapers, and the behaviours to act more like children than infants. While this doesn’t quite allow for the repeated textual confirmations in TLG that the twins are four, we’ll go with what mathematically makes sense.

That brings us to the end of the timeline! Not everything is touched on in the timeline, and not everything in the books is plotted (we are never given enough context to know Foaly’s or Opal’s birthdates, for instance). But the main events of the Artemis Fowl series are all analyzed, mathematically or logically or textually corroborated, and plotted out, for use or ignoring as personal preference dictates.

[snickerdoodlles]

📓 :3

:D!

@mortimerlatrice got me thinking about a KimChay Chrestomanci AU, so more of that.

the Chrestomanci series, sidenote, is an absolutely delightful fantasy series by Diana Wynne Jones. it's composed of mostly independent stories set in a universe of 12 parallel universes (called Series), each with their own string of worlds (except Series 11). generally speaking, every person has eight identical copies borne into other series than their own, but very occasionally all nine lives will be borne into one person. this nine-life enchanter has all the power of nine magical people in them and is therefore the only person powerful enough to fill the role of Chrestomanci to regulate magical use and prevent any abuse of it across the 12 series.

which cool, very fun story premise actually, but not what I care about here. I'm setting kp in one of the series that doesn't deal much with magic because I don't care about magic meet mafia, I care about Chay having nine lives and all the ways that could make things worse.

(cw: non-permanent but slightly graphic character death under the cut. ft a dash of actual character death, but that only applies to Tawan.)

Chay doesn't have all his lives when canon starts. he lost his first one the same day he and Porsche lost their parents when he fell out of his crib trying to investigate the noise. he lost his second to food poisoning, before Porsche started working for extra food money and they had to make every scrap stretch. he lost another when a debt collector hit him too hard and snapped his neck. (Porsche wasn't home for that day. Chay told him he wasn't either.)

Chay loses his fourth life in the warehouse. it actually wasn't intentional on anyone's part -- Tawan's hired meat weren't careful enough bringing him in, and Chay's luck has his head hit a curb or scrap metal at just the right (or wrong, as it were) angle to kill him instead of concuss him, and head injuries take so long to come back from. Tawan drags out the charade because he wants Porsche desperate, not angry, and Porsche is in too deep of denial to accept the possibility of Chay actually being dead not to fall for it.

Kim arrives before Chay comes back to life. it's...bad. Porsche is screaming for him to get Chay out. Kim first checks Chay's breathing. failing to find that, he frantically (but carefully!) hauls Chay upright. that's when Chay's head flops limply to the side and reveals the dried blood down the back of his neck, which Kim had already felt grabbing but refused to process.

Kim sees red.

Tawan knifes Big. Porsche's shouts break through the fog threatening to overwhelm Kim. then Tawan gets one very distraught, very angry, very murderous Kim materializing in front of him and going right for his eyes. it doesn't matter that Tawan's the one with a weapon, he could've had an armory and that couldn't have helped him. Kim is very, very, very good at fighting, and he's on a mission to hurt. but he's also missing his control, and kicks Tawan in the kidney so hard Tawan stumbles back into a pile of scrap and, in true irony, jostles it hard enough the end of steel beam falls on his head. as discovered earlier, metal and concrete are not kind to heads, and bullet proof vests certainly can't protect from that.

it's too quick and too kind, and Kim stares at him disbelievingly, half a mind to drag Tawan out and beat out the little life he's surely still clinging to, when Chay groans. Kim first thinks he hallucinated it, but then he sees Chay move and he's so relieved he was wrong that he shoves everything else out of his mind and just gets Chay out. then everything and one trailing shouty Porsche slams back into him the minute Chay's out of his arms and with the paramedics that Kim bolts to go hide in a dark corner in his apartment and fail to process any of it.

Chay misses all of this btws. He was dead, then he was back with a headache, and he loves Porsche but he needs Porsche to please shut the fuck up and get him some tylenol.

then apartment confrontation, where Kim says I'm sorry and shoves off even quicker because all he can remember are those moments when he'd been so sure Chay was properly dead. club scene goes down even worse when Kim yells at Chay for making stupid reckless choices that could get him killed, and Chay demands to know why Kim even cares, and Kim goes pale with anger that Chay doesn't care that he (only nearly, surely) died, and it's all very terrible and ends in them storming away from each other.

then comes Yok's bar.

Chay dies. Kim had taunted them into a direct fight inside instead of picking them off outside, and it should have been fine, would have been fine, had Chay not had a bit more awareness and looked over to see Kim pinned between two guys and rushed to help only to get shot by one of the goons on the other end of the bar. he bleeds out while Kim kills off the rest.

Chay comes back to a bar full of bodies and Kim (clutching) cradling him. Kim isn't crying. he isn't really doing much of anything other than clinging and staring off into nothing with a thoroughly haunted expression.

Chay blinks and tentatively lays his fingers against Kim's cheek. "Kim?"

Kim's eyes snap to him, but still don't quite see him. he stays looking blank for a few seconds that feel like hours before saying matter-of-factly, "I've snapped."

"Kim!" Chay protests, distressed.

"It's okay," Kim says, still matter-of-fact but smiling tenderly, "better to be mad with you than without."

it takes a while to convince Kim he's not insane and that Chay's really back. Chay's not certain he fully manages it. but his death also shook loose a lot of confessions Kim normally couldn't say out loud. ("why--" Chay starts, voice cracking, "why did you say 'I'm sorry' that day?" / "You were supposed to be safe," Kim replies hoarsely, mad smile slipping for tears.) there's more clutching and clinging, this time by Chay too. both of them manage to forget they're in a bar of dead bodies until Porsche and Kinn come crashing through the door.

"Chay!" Porsche yells when he first sees him.

"Chay," Porsche pleads brokenly when he sees Chay's blood soaked shirt.

"Not mine!" Chay says quickly, and would've been given away by how fast Kim's head snaps around in any other circumstance. "See?" he says, raising his shirt to show unblemished skin, "No injury."

this does a lot to reassure Porsche, but Chay can tell Kim still thinks he's a little bit insane. Chay decides that's fine for now, because dying takes a lot out of you and apparently everyone around you too and it's unfair to expect Kim to just bounce back from him bleeding out on him, he'll work on it after a shower and dinner.

I'm not writing this AU because I only really have these two vague scenes in my head, but Chay having multiple lives making his existence in the mafia hurt more than canon's calls to me, it really does.

oh, also: in the AU source material, one of the nine-lifers has one of his lives removed and stored into a ring for safekeeping. he later gives this ring to his to-be-wife as her wedding ring. I'm not sure yet how to work that into this AU because Chay's contact with magic and other magicals would be slim to none in this, but please picture how this would absolutely wreck Kim, because there's nothing Kim wants more than to safeguard Chay but as far as he's concerned, he's already failed Chay in that regard twice. 😈

[[ ask me about fics im not writing ]]

[firebound-press]

Second binding I did was Passerine, by @thcscus!

This has always been one of my favorite fics of all time, and it only felt right that I had a copy of my own to put on my shelf. I did this one during late June of 2022.

This was my first time attempting both a sewn endband and trimming of my textblock, but I’m still very proud of it.

Another thing I love about this is the typesetting! I spent so long trying to make it as elegant and fancy as the actual vibes of the fic itself, and I’m still so damn proud of how it came out. Especially with the little 3 line poems that were in the summaries of each chapter

You can read the original work here:

[jamiethebee]

I know everyone likes the "Fenton parents are dead/evil" route to drive Danny to Gotham, but I propose: "the Fenton parents have to send Danny away to keep him safe/cut off contact (since they're technically contracted to the government and the GIW is the definition of shady and spies)"

[twistedappletree]

Modern!AU Zhuiling going on regular bookshop dates because Jin Ling knows how much Lan Sizhui loves books—and though he’d never admit it out loud, he loves watching LSZ zoom around the bookshop, piling several books in his arms and lighting up at all the titles that catch his interest.

Sometimes they huddle up on the floor together in an empty aisle and flip through pages while LSZ reads random passages out loud and JL rests his chin on LSZ’s shoulder, reading along and listening to his gentle ‘library’ voice.

Eventually, they grab coffee at the bookshop’s cozy little cafe filled with warm faerie lights and flickering neon signs buzzing on the walls while LSZ gushes over his new collection of books and JL watches him from across the table with the most adoring smile that he immediately tries to hide by shaking his bangs in his face and nervously sipping his coffee every time LSZ looks at him. ✨

[glow-worms-are-believers]

The Curse of a Cure (dp blurb)

(tw lab animal testing, tw animal death) A lab rat dies gruesomely, so be warned. This whole thing is pretty grim, really.

At first, Madeline had been horrified. There was Danny standing in front of her and Jack, looking like he was expecting a blow and Madeline had thought "I did this". She had shot at her son and had hoped to dissect him and write a successful paper on it. For a second, Madeline thought she might throw up.

Jack had surged forward for a hug and while her husband didn't notice, Madeline saw the flinch Danny tried to repress at the sudden movement. Her heart had felt like it was slashed by one of their sharp scalpel. She had joined in and had squeezed her baby as hard as she could as they all started crying. Jazz had joined in and soon they were on the floor blubbering as she and Jack tearfully apologized and made sure to smother both children with hugs.

It was only afterwards, when her emotions had calmed down that she started thinking about the implication of her son being Phantom. And that was when the doubt first started.

Because Madeline may have been a mother first, but she was a scientist second. And she had dedicated her life to the study of ectoplasm and what was termed in the common vernacular as 'ghost'. There was a reason she and Jack had gone with theory of ghost being imprints of consciousness instead of simply a continued state of existence. Ghost formed upon the death of a being if that being was surrounded by enough ectoplasm. However, they had observed that nothing that was lost from the corpse during the formation of the ghost. In other words, the ghost did not use any of the existing tissues to transform it and feed the ectoplasm, it simply copied what was existing. The ghost was a mere imperfect copy of the previous being, and one that did not evolve over time as living organisms did. They were incomplete, violent copies of living consciousness that could not learn and change which explained why so many ghosts displayed obsessive behaviours as they could not grow past them. Jack and Madeline had thus determined that ghosts were not real beings, but rather twisted echoes of people.

Danny did not behave like a twisted echo of himself though, and Madeline had told herself this was proof that there was something the science had not found, something that explained why ghosts were more than they had hypothesized. She did not mention this to her husband as it felt like a betrayal of the total acceptance they had promised to provide for Danny.

It wasn't until a few weeks later that the doubts came back. Danny had explained to her that he was considered a 'halfa' which was a term for half-ghost and half-human. And once again, Madeline went back to their research. Upon realizing human tissue and ectoplasm did not interact naturally, she and her husband had decided to force them to interact. They had injected a rat with an absurdly diluted amount of ectoplasm, a dose so small that even botulinum wouldn't harm the animal in this quantity. At first, there had been no reaction and for a few days the rodent had been fine. After a few days though, the rat had started behaving strangely, it had stopped eating and its breathing had become slow and erratic. It had started having muscle spasm, and within a few hours it had been unable to move. The spasms had soon turned into full on seizures with its muscle locking into place. It had finally died in what seemed like terrible pain after a few hours of torture. A ghost had formed shortly afterwards which they had captured for future reference. Madeline had taken a scalpel to the body and had found that all the blood in the rat had turned to ectoplasm and that its internal organs had started melting as well. After some further testing they had discovered that if ectoplasm entered the bloodstream, no matter in what quantity, it would eventually contain the whole body and would turn it into ectoplasm which would then start corroding the body from the inside. The results were so gruesome, she and Jack had abandoned this experiment and had resolved to insure never to let ectoplasm enter in contact with their blood.

So when Danny had said he was half of a ghost, which meant half composed of ectoplasm, Madeline had known that was impossible. She had still held onto the hope that she may have been wrong and that their results were incomplete, but the evidence kept piling up: Danny's declining health since the accident, how he had stopped eating as much, how he was not breathing as much as he should, how his heart rate was well-below the normal rate. And Madeline had known she could not keep it to herself any longer. She'd shown Jack her findings and he had fell into a grim silence, the realization settled heavily on them. Their son was going to die, probably in terrible pain unless they did something.

This was still Danny, Madeline was convinced, but the ectoplasm in his body was poisoning him and he did not even realize it. It was not a symbiotic relationship as he had explained, but a parasite clinging to her baby boy and siphoning his life away. Every time she looked at Danny now, the image of that rat's last moments, twisting and squealing brokenly kept replaying in her mind.

So, she and Jack told the children they were working on a new ghost shield and they locked themselves in the lab searching for an answer, something to save their baby boy. Time was ticking and both parents were aware that they did not have any of it to waste.

It took too long, weeks, but eventually they found it.

Ectoranium. It was a very rare element that was not found anywhere except meteorite debris. They had been able to get their hands on some of it by pure chance, and after tireless work, they had managed to distill some into a solution that could be injected into the bloodstream and hopefully negate the effect of ectoplasm. They did not have enough for a proper round of testing but they did inject one of their lab rat with it and it showed no adverse effect, even after a week. They'd made sure it was safe for humans as well by injecting a small amount in their own body, which had showed no effects once again.

Madeline had discreetly broached the subject of purging ectoplasm from Danny's body by introducing it as a thought experiment. Both Jazz and Danny had reacted explosively with their son insisting the ectoplasm was what was keeping him alive. She tried to talk about the rat and the experiment they had done. She had compared its symptoms with Danny's but had been brushed away with a roll of the eyes and a "Frostbite would've told me it there was any danger of that." That was when she realized her children would not be convinced no matter what evidence they showed them.

So, one night, while Jazz was on a sleepover with a friend, they waited until Danny was asleep before getting him down to the lab. They secured restraints around his wrists and despite the padding they had added to make sure their baby wouldn't hurt himself, Madeline felt her throat close up and her resolve waver at the sight of it. But she remembered the rat, and she shoved the guilt away to deal with later. She would apologize a thousand times once her baby was safe. They had hoped Danny would stay asleep for the duration of the process, but unfortunately, he woke up as she was finishing up the syringe preparation.

He blinked blearily before realizing he was restrained. Then he pulled on the restrains as he looked around.

"Mom, dad? What are you doing?" he asked blearily.

"Sh, Danny-o," Jack said. "Don't worry, you'll feel much better soon."

"What?" Danny said, before he caught sight of the syringe. "No, wait let me go!"

"This is for your own good, baby," Madeline said as her gut twisted when she saw the fear in Danny's eyes.

He started struggling in earnest and tried to go intangible but the restraint held fast. He yelled at them to stop, but Madeline forced herself to tune him out. When he saw that she was still walking towards him with the syringe, he started screaming in terror and she could see Jack turn away with tears in his eyes and she could hardly stop her own, as she approached her baby. "Sh, baby, please, this will help you, I promise," she repeated in a choked voice.

Danny had started crying and Madeline joined in as well, as she pet his hair in comfort, shushing him brokenly, while with the other hand she inserted the needle in his arm.

"I love you," she repeated as she pressed down on the plunger, injecting the solution in his veins as he let out one last anguished cry that Madeline forced herself to ignore.

This would save him. She knew it would.

[rotisseries]

people are very weird about shockfics like what is up with that

[erstwhilesparrow]

Can you tell me more about this vampire hunter pretending to be domestic? 👀

i can!! i very very very much can!! :D

so. first thing you need to know is that this is an AU of an AU and i've entirely lost the thread. the second thing you need to know is that this AU of an AU is the lovely @cohnal's doing. it read one of my fics and went, "hey, what if [Much Beloved Character] met these guys." and i went, "AUGH. FUCK. YEAH. HELL YEAH."

under a cut due to Paragraphs. o/

o/ !

so. the background information is that there's this little gang of three vampires who've been living together for a long time. they're super close, and have most recently been living in a big old house somewhere that could reasonably be described as 'on the edge of town.' they've been getting a little reckless lately with their feeding, killing people they probably shouldn't and attracting attention when they didn't before. so one day, a vampire hunter comes to town.

the hunter -- we will call him owen -- by virtue of being a hunter, is already a little on the edge of things. his work mostly keeps him alone and separate from others. this is an interesting contrast to the vampires, who have of course been exiled from life but very much behave like family with each other. it's winter, and owen gets trapped with the vampires in their big old house.

the 'pretending at domesticity' was a thing in my original fic -- the vampires sometimes put blood in bowls and sit around the dining room table drinking it as if it's soup; one of them curls up in front of the fireplace and thinks about how if she looks very sweet the others might carry her upstairs like a child to her room -- and it was at least in part about... playing with this image of 'family'? none of the three vampires stays in the 'parent' or 'child' or 'sibling' or 'partner' role for very long in relation to the other two. it's supposed to be a little bit off, a little more mutable, a little of both [hey this set-up looks familiar] and [hey wait that's not supposed to happen].

and the thing my brain has snagged on re: owen is (1) figuring out how he responds to this, as someone who has no family or other long-lasting connections, and (2) where he ends up fitting into this dynamic? because. look. he's trapped in a house full of vampires. his whole job might be killing them, but he's not walking away from this one. i like the idea of him turned more than i like the idea of him drained of blood and dumped in the snow.

so. guy trapped in a house with something family-shaped but not in the traditional sense. the image of him fitting alarmingly well into that family-shape. the image of him bristling with weapons and tension still sitting down at the table to... eat? the image of all of them, three vampires and owen, settling in front of the fireplace as if to share drinks and stories, and that's where one of them sinks their teeth in his neck to make him turn.

[camellcat]

I keep thinking about this one fic, where amy gets sent back in time to the beginning of s1 by a weeping angel, and like. idk. I want to see clara in s1. idk how'd she get there. probably some wackiness of converging timelines or whatever since we already know she's, like, woven throughout his entire life. but I just wanna see her reaction to nine and rose. specifically nine. and then seeing how different s2 ten is to ANY doctor she's ever known. I want her there!!! plus her and rose would be best friends SORRY I keep saying it but it's TRUE

[non-un-topo]

Perferō turned a year old, so I’ve been having emotions.

(version with will-o the wisps under the cut)

[cryptidafter]

why do character haters not know how to just...block tags?

[lit-in-thy-heart]

people leaving not glowing reviews in ao3 bookmarks my unbeloved

[irregularbillcipher]

going over old fic notes and outlines and character talks with friends and it's always really funny when i get to the stuff i was developing early-mid 2019 where bill just literally kept kryptos around to rag on, and he genuinely just. did not like the man. like was just completely annoyed with his general existence. boy have things changed

[aroaessidhe]

2023 reads // twitter thread

Zombabe

paranormal YA set in a small town in 2003 where weird things happen that mostly get ignored

a boy is resurrected by his best friend after dying just before graduation. but he’s maybe a zombie now and if he ignores his hunger for flesh an ancient evil might start causing bigger problems

thankfully one of his friends’ aunt is a cop who has no problem helping get rid of some of the local nazis

queer teen friend group, m/m