sholio | Entries tagged with recs:tfatws

Today brought delightful fandom things that also fit a weirdly specific theme: morally gray canon villains-slash-allies as small cute animals.

philomytha wrote an absolutely charming AU in which von Stalhein is a stray alley cat rescued by Biggles, The Grey Cat - also there is an additional coda written by me in Philomytha's comments to the DW version, and this comment thread about cat!EvS's clandestine activities replicating human!EvS's undercover canon past. (Edit: and now two more commentfics in the comments!)

Anyway, somehow the Biggles/EvS dynamic maps perfectly onto Biggles trying to tame this awful stray cat while completely shutting down anyone's efforts to tell him why this is a bad idea or say mean things about his terrible cat. Stop asking questions, this is his cat now, why are people making a big deal about this, of course it's living in our shed now, Algy, why do you ask.

So there was that, and then I ran across this art on Twitter of Zemo as a hamster. It's the one where he's cupped in Bucky's hands that really gets to me, I think. Also, he's just so round.

I failed catastrophically to rec my amazing gifts during the anonymous period, so I will just roll that into my new-fic-announcement post.

First, my amazing gifts:

Circle Like a Snake by

scioscribe (Falcon & Winter Soldier, gen, 14K wds)
Zemo shows up on Sam and Bucky's doorstep with a mission: help him rescue Sokovian refugee children from a HYDRA lab.
He also has a new, Raft-provided accessory: a tracker bracelet that's putting a slow drip of poison into his veins.

Poisoned with 24 hours to live, my beloved! ♥ And it delivers beautifully on everything that is suggested by that premise.

Hold On by

sheron (Falcon & Winter Soldier, gen, 7K wds)
A secret video from the Raft underwater prison reveals to Sam and Bucky the experiments that were conducted on the human prisoners there. They race to the rescue.

Thoroughly satisfying wingfic with wonderfully visceral and body-horrory wing descriptions and loads of h/c. ♥

I will be imagining all the sequels to both of these.

And here is what I wrote:

Escape Hatch (Falcon & Winter Soldier, gen, 10K wds)
"You need to listen to me," Zemo said. "I've been sent to kill you, Sam. There is a bomb in my back. I think we can safely say—" He smiled briefly, humorlessly, at their horrified expressions. "—That the mission did not go as planned."

Just your basic (mostly) fake betrayal with an implanted bomb. As you do.

Beads on a String (Falcon & Winter Soldier, gen, 14K wds)
When Wakanda pulls Zemo out of the Raft and sends him on a mission, Ayo is tasked with being his handler. But there is more to it than either of them knows.

I nabbed this one as a pinch hit, because the "Ayo working with Zemo" prompt was so compelling and I really enjoyed working both character arcs around that. Ayo's POV is really fun to write, plus bonus Wakandan worldbuilding.

ficinabox reveals were this past week, and I got two glorious gifts, both for Falcon & Winter Soldier!

Unravel (3400 wds, Sam/Bucky/Zemo)
Zemo gets hit with a drug that makes him crave touch. The pairing is pretty light and background-ish; it's mostly petting. And what glorious petting it is. <3 This was everything I wanted from this premise.

Devil's Hour (11K, Bucky/Zemo)
Zemo escapes from prison and starts calling Bucky in the middle of the night. Lovely slow burn relationship-building fic with a very plausible arc from their canon-compliant mutual distrust to something more.

And here are some things I've read and liked so far:

Definitely check out the whole Falcon & Winter Soldier section - there's a lot of good fic in there, including some really excellent Bucky/Sam.

The Ben January section is also really excellent if Ben/Shaw is your pairing; there's some really nice art and a Shaw as a werewolf fic (a Lady of Perdition tag) that's beautifully canon-compliant and very good.

it's in your head (Dark Matter, Three/Six but also very team-oriented, 5700 wds)
Nicely creepy and very canon-plausible haunted-Raza fic with a Three focus, great character voices and excellent team interactions!

In the Heart of the Holler (Justified, Loretta & Raylan, 3600 wds)
The stories say there's a place in Harlan County that will grant your wish on Halloween night. This is creepy and gorgeous and fantastic, really excellent horror that also feels perfectly in keeping with the setting.

My sister (38F) just rented my (31M) ex-GF's father's house. Should I go visit my sister and BIL, or stay away? (Persuasion AU, 2900 words)
Persuasion as a series of reddit posts to /r/relationships. This is hilarious.

Where never lark or ever eagle flew (Captain Marvel, Carol/Maria, 2300 wds)
Post-canon fic in which Maria and Monica go to space with Carol and the Skrulls. Sweet and fun with excellent SF ambiance.

love is not a victory march (ATLA, Iroh & Zuko gen, 4500 wds)
Five times that Iroh serves Zuko tea, and one time that Zuko serves Iroh tea. Takes place from pre-canon to post-canon, very sweet and in character. Awwwww.

Ask A Manager: Help, I’m Being Transferred to My Mother’s Work Unit! (Vorkosigan Saga, Ivan, 2200 wds)
The Barrayan nobility as basically a dysfunctional family-run company is a weirdly good fit. Very cute.

A Map That Shows The User A Detailed Blueprint Of Whatever They Are Currently Looking At (art, no fandom)
A garbage-tier magical item that definitely puts the garbage in garbage-tier.

Crossposts: https://sholio.livejournal.com/1040524.html

This is the place by

solgarmr (56K, Sam/Bucky + Zemo)
Captain America, Bucky Barnes and one of the most dangerous men on earth take a break from the world and learn that talking about their feelings isn't really that bad.

This is tagged Sam/Bucky, but is actually more like Sam/Bucky/Zemo or Sam/Bucky + Bucky/Zemo ... but in a really unusual way. So basically, you don't encounter true relationship ambiguity in fanfic very often. Not in the sense that the story is intentionally coy about what's going on, but rather, it's that most fanfic hits very traditional romance beats, and this doesn't. Instead it exists in the slippery, awkward relationship zone where even the people involved can't quite nail down what's happening here. It's not exactly platonic, not exactly romantic, and not exactly smarm. But there clearly is something going on - something tender and fraught and slow-burn, for all three legs of the triad, but in very different ways. The writing is awkward in places, but the story makes up for it (for me).

It's sweet and unusual and painful and weird, and perhaps one of my favorite things that I've read in the fandom so far.

Crossposts: https://sholio.livejournal.com/1030840.html

multifandomhorrorexchange released today, and my gift is a pure no-holds-barred delight.

If You Get Lost (Falcon & Winter Soldier, Sam & Bucky & Zemo, light pre-slash, 14.7K)
Sam, Bucky, and Zemo explore a forest that suddenly appeared overnight.
They get considerably more than they bargained for.

This is wonderfully creepy, with beautifully drawn character relationships and exactly the right blend of trust and distrust, reluctant liking and wariness and general interpersonal weirdness that I want from these three.

I also have a story in the collection, and there are a wide variety of other offerings available, including some excellent original fic! Go forth and enjoy.

Crossposts: https://sholio.livejournal.com/1023118.html

I have had a lovely birthday! Thank you so much for your birthday wishes and other beautiful things, which I will respond to as soon as I can!

We had perfect weather, sunny and breezy with mixed clouds and sun, not too hot or cold. We drove to Nenana, an old riverboat town (now mostly without the riverboats) a little over an hour's drive south of here, which we've never actually explored. It turns out there's very little to explore, but the old houses are interesting to look at, and we looked at a fish wheel (from a respectful distance, as it's private property and someone's livelihood), got excellent sandwiches from a cafe and ate them sitting on the Subaru's tailgate by the river.

Then we came home, I ate birthday brownies and wrote on my romance novel and then we walked to the nearby beaver pond in the dusk and heard beavers calling to each other. I didn't even know beavers make vocalizations; this is the first time I've ever heard them. It was an adult calling to a baby, and we thought at first it might be a duck (we couldn't see clearly through the brush, and weren't sure the beaver was what was making that noise) - until we saw the baby (so tiny! so round! so SMOL) clamber over a mudbar and swim to catch up. Here is a Youtube recording of what beavers sound like. The "wah, wah!" sound is just what we heard.

And you need to read the glorious Falcon & Winter Soldier birthday gift fic that

sovay wrote for me!

Longing, Rusted, Seventeen (Falcon & Winter Soldier, 1900 words, Bucky & Sam & Sarah + Zemo's unseen presence)
If he kept his combat face on, Bucky could make himself believe it looked like nothing much, lying on the cream-scrubbed deck of the Paul & Darlene in the salt-clean morning sun: a red book with a black star, about the size of the composition books of his school days, far too many wars ago.

It is lovely - the vivid setting, the characters, the complex relationships these people have with each other, and the book with 70 years' weight of personal history and trauma in it. I loved every bit of it.