Arctic Light

I just realized I forgot to post about this! Hurt/Comfort Exchange is open for reading now, with 200+ fanworks, and I am thrilled with my amazing gifts!

voltage (Agent Carter, Jack/Peggy/Daniel, 3200)
Deliciously iddy and in-character comfort after torture/OT3 get-together. <333

Jack of Spades (Iron Fist, Ward & Danny, 2300 words)
Danny goes in to rescue Ward, who's trapped in a dream. Worry and intimacy and FEELINGS and perfectly in-character voices. MY BABIES.


I also got an unexpected gift in the makeup round for the Writing Rainbow flash exchanges. Since I wasn't signed up, it was such a nice surprise!

Flower of This Purple Dye (Benjamin January mysteries, Ben/Shaw, 900)
Soulmate fic! Goes AU at the hug in Wet Grave. Delightful.


Getting back to H/C-Ex, I haven't read much of the collection yet, but here are some things I loved:

Risk Management (Iron Fist, Ward & Danny, 2500 wds)
A really lovely gen soulbonding fic. Of course he would, and of course he did.

stumble in my footsteps (Iron Fist, Ward & Danny, 3300 wds)
Content warning: past incest (not between them) and noncon
Danny finds out about an attempt to blackmail Ward with old tapes of Ward and Harold. Just the right amount of ouch.

Spinning, Unspun (Agent Carter, Peggy/Jack/Daniel, 1800 wds)
Sweet and gentle aftermath-of-torture petting, with a great drugged!Jack POV.

Choosing My Confessions (Person of Interest, Fusco & Shaw, 3700 wds)
I don't really read much PoI fic since I only watched the first two seasons, but I saw the character team-up and thought "ooooh, must read this" and this is excellent; it's the "forced to play evil undercover" trope with two people who actually don't have all that much reason to trust each other. Achy and satisfying.

I got a lovely story gifted to me!

hard knocks by alessandriana - Agent Carter, Jack with a head injury and Peggy trying to get them both out. IT'S EXCELLENT. ♥

I've also got another AC story, SNAFU, loaded up in a tab to read - different author, but it looks hurtcomforty and very much my cup of tea.

I have embarked on a project to try to clear out my backlog of unanswered AO3 comments by the end of the year, so if you find yourself suddenly getting several replies to comments you left for me a year ago, that's why. (I should say, my unanswered comments going back to early 2018. There's no way I'm going to get caught up if I try to go farther back than that, and no real point in doing so since a lot of those people probably aren't even reading in the fandom anymore. I STILL LOVE ALL MY COMMENTS THO'.)

I'm also working on getting through my backlog of unanswered Tumblr prompts; I'd like to clear out my inbox by the end of the year, and then open up for new prompts again. Going off my success at Whumptober, I decided to do them in a similar way, so I made a list and started filling them in whatever order I felt inspired. I've been working on that off and on throughout November, but figured I'd wait to start posting them 'til December(ish) since just having the list was inspiring for me. Should I do those Whumptober-style and crosspost them here? They're all Agent Carter (the majority) and Iron Fist/Defenders. I could do one a day for most of December.

Slipping in under the wire here with a few things I've read lately that I liked! And also, scioscribe wrote my glorious Just Married gift fic and it is still excellent.

Heavy is the Head by glorious_spoon (Agent Carter, 2500 words)
Season 1-era Dooley POV on the trio. Really fun.

Blue Square by primeideal (Stranger Things, 1K words, Steve & Robin)
This was written in a tag-based exchange for the tag "Two Characters Who Don't Like Each Other Grudgingly Share A Ski Lift", and it delivers gloriously on that premise, as well as nailing the show's fun weirdness.

don't leave me hanging on like a yo-yo by firstaudrina (Stranger Things, 1300 wds)
Post-S3 Max & El friendship. Really sweet.

Hallway Light by snickfic (Captain Marvel, 1100 wds)
Pre-movie Carol & Yon-Rogg backstory, with a great glimpse of Hala and a perfect balance of genuine camaraderie and underlying creepiness.

I can't see any reason not to turn these posts into an open reccing thread, so tell me about anything you've found lately that's good!

I participated in two different fic exchanges this Valentine's Day, and I feel like I totally won the exchange lottery this year. :D Sometimes you get something and have to scrape up enthusiasm for it. This time, I absolutely loved every single gift I got, and they were all really different from each other while still being things I really wanted.

First up, Agent Carter Valentines doesn't have an anon period, and there are 24 different fics and artworks with a variety of pairings (and gen!).

My gift was:
found a calling sweet as a lover by WhiteLadyoftheRing (1100 words, Peggy/Daniel/Jack)
It's a beautifully written little Valentine's slice-of-life with the SSR OT3 that I simply adored.

And Chocolate Box released early this morning and is still anon. I got treats!! And I really loved everything.

without a center in space (Dark Matter, 1100 words, sex pollen)
One of my perennial requests in Dark Matter is for sex pollen fic, and someone filled it (!!) ... PERFECTLY. You know how sometimes there's something you want from a trope, and it's almost never actually written that way, and then you stumble across a fic that does it exactly how you want it? THIS IS THAT FIC. It is the (non)platonic ideal of what I want from a sex pollen fic in general, and from these characters specifically. Also including possibly the best description of the actual sex that I've ever read in a sex pollen fic: ( Cut because running across this line in context is even better ) Which probably makes the story sound much crackier than it actually is. It really isn't cracky at all. It's just that this is SO FAR from the weirdest thing that's ever happened to them ...

And then I got two Stranger Things fics featuring my two (different) favorite character relationships from the series, both sweet and well written and 100% in character.

Emergency (1000 words, Steve & Dustin)
In which Dustin has a problem that only Steve can help with. In the middle of the night. Not involving monsters from another dimension, this time. Sweet, bantery, and perfect.

on the run tonight (1900 words, Steve/Nancy/Jonathan)
And then I got 1900 words of monster hunting and cuddling and Steve h/c!! RIGHT AFTER I had been commiserating with someone else (on Tumblr) that there's not enough monster-of-the-week fic in STh fandom. AND SOMEONE WROTE ME ONE!

Seriously, there are times when you get one great gift and that's wonderful, but any single one of these would've been a perfect gift and they're ALL great and ALL different and I truly couldn't pick which one is my favorite!

So yeah. It's a good Valentine's Day.

This is post-Civil War, and therefore contains huuuuge spoilers for that movie. But it's SO GOOD:

the lingering remainders by oh_simone (gen, 5500 wds)
In which, a visitor from Tony Stark's past drops by the Avengers compound to drink his top shelf liquor and provide some perspective.

Despite the Civil War time period, this is very much an Agent Carter fic (though equally much a Captain America-Iron Man fic). Back when I first got into the show last year, oh_simone's AC fics were one of my favorite things in the fandom; she writes a fabulous Jack-Peggy-Daniel triad, so I was really hoping she'd come back and write some more after season two. And this does not disappoint in the slightest, tying together the present and past generations of MCU characters with themes of forgiveness, family, and redemption -- all delivered in a light, funny tone that just means it hits all the harder when it turns around and delivers a straight punch to the feels. Oh, my heart.

(This fic does incorporate a small amount of Marvel comics canon -- Flash Thompson, a comics-only character, and his rivalry with Peter Parker -- and those bits make more sense if you're familiar with the comics versions of the characters, but it's a relatively minor aspect of the story. Normally mixing comics with MCU canon is a hard DNW for me, but in this case, it's so adorable and connects to the overall theme of the story so well that I'm delighted to have it.)

If you're craving post-finale fic (AREN'T WE ALL), here's a lovely long plotty one:

Training Exercises by sheron (11,200 words; canon pairings + gen friendships) - hard to summarize without spoiling the finale, but basically about SSR team building, recovery, and learning to trust each other again.

Full disclosure: I was a cheerleader/alpha reader on this fic, though my "help" mostly consisted of sending emails back to sheron in which I flailed a lot and made "write more!" noises and feelsdumped about Jack all over her inbox.