Case Fic and Id Pro Quo (both B5)

[sholio]

A couple of different exchanges had author reveals this week!

I wasn't signed up for Case Fic, but I participated as a pinch hitter with this:

The Jewel Bug Affair (Babylon 5, 9K, Ivanova & Garibaldi + others)

I had been eyeing this request back when I had considered signing up, so when it came up for PH, I had to jump on it. One of the recipient's requests was for a canon divergent AU in which Garibaldi and Ivanova quit the military and run a detective agency together, so that's what this is, and I had a fun time with alien worldbuilding and writing characters I don't normally write much.

Slight fic spoilers

The thing that made the idea of it click into place was deciding to set it at the start of season five, when everyone is dealing (or not-dealing) with massive trauma from the war. I don't really think that I've seen fic deal with that too much - it's not completely nonexistent, but a lot of the fic, even if it's set around that time, is focused on something else (AU fixes of character deaths, say) as opposed to just letting the human characters bounce off each other while they're all really messed up. And building a casefic plot that involved alien cultures and worldbuilding was a good time, too.

And there was also Id Pro Quo earlier this week, where I wrote:

Silken (Babylon 5, 2900 wds, Londo/G'Kar, explicit)
This was one of those neat bits of exchange synchronicity when I wrote something I 100% would not have written without having my recipient prompt it, but once I got into it, I had a great iddy time with it.

Details

Basically they had a fairly specific scenario for G'Kar being triggered by past, Centauri-related trauma during sex with Londo, and *especially* if it was related to the Centauri stereotype of Narn as sexually aggressive beasts. I actually wrote two versions of this - the original was shorter and simply involved G'Kar unexpectedly freaking out about being tied up. But I wasn't happy with it, because it felt much more true to character and satisfying - also *way* harder to write - if what he reacts to is actually roleplaying being a sexual aggressor in a kink scenario. And in the end I was very satisfied with it, even though I think I wouldn't have tackled this at all if I hadn't had the request to give me the impetus to write it. "Topping character dissociates into a panic attack over trauma related to topping" isn't something I've written before in any fandom, but it felt like a scenario that worked really well for them, and I was thoroughly happy with how it came out!

Comments

[sovay]

The Jewel Bug Affair (Babylon 5, 9K, Ivanova & Garibaldi + others)

I did not see this one at the time and extremely enjoyed it.

Silken (Babylon 5, 2900 wds, Londo/G'Kar, explicit)

I did see this one, thought it was yours, and have no idea why I didn't leave a comment except that the end of July was bad.

[sholio]

I did see this one, thought it was yours, and have no idea why I didn't leave a comment except that the end of July was bad.

Your kudos was noticed and appreciated! Comments are never required. <3

I'm glad you liked the other one too!