Stories for a winter's night

I though to try some six sentence Sunday. I'd like to get into the habit to help my creativity come back. So this is from a little something I'm working on. Pipermca had been looking for pairing suggestions for comment and I threw out Mirage/Smokescreen. They're characters who are generally presented as either being distant or outright hating each other. Pipermca suggested something complicated or maybe unrequited, and I've been working on something ever since. I'm also trying present tense for the first time.

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He has to admit, the mech has a way with his hands - hands that are too heavy, fingers that are too blunt. There is nothing that should be attractive about the Praxian. He is too short, too heavy, too blunt to be a proper Praxian if Prowl and Bluestreak are anything to go by. Mirage has to admit that he hadn’t had many dealings with Praxians before the City-State fell, but he has every reason to believe that the other two are far better examples of their kind than Smokescreen is. His colours are garish, his manners crass, and if scuttlebutt is to be believed, he is a degenerate who’s just as likely to help you as to sell you to the highest bidder to pay off his gambling debts.

And yet, through all of that, Mirage still finds himself staring.

I'm trying to get back to something that resembles normalcy so back to keeping regular updates and attempting to get back to writing. So, lets get back into this:

1. Bleeding Daylight - This was to be my entry to the Robot Big Bang before life tried to eat me and resulted in my dropping out. It's a Wings Universe AU dealing with a Smokescreen/Swindle cross faction relationship, questions just how free the Decepticons are, and its just an all around epic love story. It's got Smokey/Swindle, Onslaught/Blast Off (and I'm trying to respectfully write demisexual Blast Off), Ratchet/Twins, and a deep Ratchet/Smokescreen friendship.

I'm currently reworking what I had already written to include the various subplots I had to drop for time and space. Once that's done I will finalize the ending, get it edited, and start with the posting. Now, since I don't want to compete with the Big Bang and I really want to be sure that things are edited well, I may not start posting this fic until the new year.

2. Being Human - This is my Humanized TF/MCU crossover. I've posted the first three chapters here and I'm currently working on the fourth. Combat is breaking out properly and the Autobots and Avengers will actually meet.
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3

3. You Remind Me of Someone I Used to Know - This story has a long, long way to go. I've worked on some of Chapter 4. Smokescreen has been found out by Jazz and Mirage and he's promised to leave Ratchet alone. Unfortunately Ratchet's curiosity has been piqued and isn't going to give up on finding out who Cortano really is.

4. Survivor's Guilt - I've been picking at this one for ages. I noticed that there were a variety of fics out there dealing with both Blue and Prowl dealing with the fall of Praxis, but it's super rare for anything to be written about Smokescreen. So I started working on this idea. It's the anniversary of the city's destruction and Smokescreen is dealing with his survivor's guilt by getting overcharged on his own and Bluestreak decides he's having none of this. This isn't going to be part of the Medical Psychology series.

5. Who Counsels the Counsellor? - This is another one that I've been picking at. It's the Festival of the Five and Smokescreen is attacked by an unknown assailant. Then he's attacked again. And again. And no one knows who's doing it. I sort of got sidetracked on this one because I couldn't decide which Autobot was doing the attacking. Fact is, according to the fandom Smokey is the designated asshole, so I wasn't sure who to chose at the bad guy knowing that I'd be pissing readers off.

4. Untitled Heat fic - There have been a variety of fics out there dealing with sudden heats among the bots. It got me to thinking, what if someone went into heat and the only person there to help them is someone they loathe. It's become a rather difficult dub-con fic that will have to be dealt with very carefully. Smokescreen/Mirage. This one is part of the Medical Psychology series.

5. Red Tape sequel - After all of the issues with my parent and the hospital, I am planning on a medical system red tape fic and poor Ratchet having to deal with it.

6. Daughters of Liberty - This is my Fallout 4 walkthrough fic. The idea is that there are a number of people survive the vault and the protagonists are a pair of sisters - one a Marine lawyer and the other an Army engineer. It's pretty amorphous at the moment but it's slowly progressing. Basically I want to flesh out the story a little and play with the world.

So, there we go. Clearly I will not be finishing all of these this month, but I do plan on working on most of them. I may post some of the WIPs over here at some point. It may be silly but I find that if I post it somewhere where people can see it (they don't need to, but they could) then I'm less likely to go back and edit the bejesus out of it.

I am really starting to dig Onslaught/Blast Off. I have this mental image of them being the quiet partners who just spend more time cuddling than anything else. And that all the other Decepticons think them perverts for it. I think I originally got the idea from a conversation from ages back where someone suggested that Klingon "bondage" would involve fuzzy slippers and pillows and other soft and tender things.

I'm also thinking that Blast Off might very well be greysexual (I think that's the right term - someone who's ace but for that one person they love they are physically intimate). I'm not entirely sure where I'm going to go with the pairing but they are interesting to write so far!

And with that, I managed this little flash fiction piece. It's not yet done since it needs some kind of actual ending, but I wanted to share it anyway.

Warning, it does contain mentions of non-con as punishment, though nothing graphic and all after the fact.

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( Read More )

Title: Role Play
Fandom: Transformer
Characters/pairing: Prowl, Sunstreaker, Prowl/Sunstreaker
Rating: T
Summary: Sunstreaker is bored and has decided to make it Prowl's problem.
A/N: I was going through my Google Docs folders and found this little ficlet written way back in 2016. I know that it was in response to a prompt of some sort but I can't for the life of me remember which prompt for which community.


( Click for the fic! )

Title: Being Human - Chapter 2
Fandom: Transformers, MCU
Characters/pairing: Jazz, Mirage, Smokescreen, Bumblebee, Ensemble
Rating: T
Summary: The Autobots and the Decepticons have a tentative truce as they try to find their lost leaders. Their hope is to regain Cybertron. In reality they are about to stumble into something even larger than themselves.

(Link to chapter 1)
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~Two years after the Battle of New York~

Jazz sat low on his suspension as he looked over the dam and attached buildings. He was surrounded by a soporific heat that bead down from above and was reflected back by the light concrete of the parking garage roof. It was incredibly pleasant and he was so very tempted to take a nap right then and there.

“You do know that we have a mission, right?” Mirage said as he pulled up next to Jazz. He had chosen a high end convertible Audi as his alt-mode. It was more than a little flashy, but reasonable for this area of Arizona/Nevada. Still, it was an unusual choice for a mech who claimed he wanted nothing more than to disappear.

“Yeah, I know,” Jazz replied. “I’m just scouting out the scene.”

“You’re a click away from napping,” Mirage said with a chuckle as he brushed his field against his commander’s.

Jazz sat up and fluffed his armour as best as his Porsche alt-mode would allow.

“What can I say? I like this place. We spent way too long without a sun on Cybertron. I’d forgotten how good it feels before we landed here. And the weather here is a damn sight better than out east.”

( Read More )

Link to Chapter 3

(x-posted to Pillowfort)

Title: You remind me of someone I used to know - Chapter 3
Fandom: Transformers: G1 - Pre-war
Characters/pairing: Smokescreen, Jazz, Powerglide, suggestion of Powerglide/Moonracer, mentions of Ratchet/Smokescreen
Rating: T
Summary: "Cortano" is found out by Jazz, leaving Smokescreen with no choice but to pill about his past and why he's hiding.

A/N: Well, it took over two years, but I finally managed to write the next chapter of this piece. The rest of it is here on A03. I'm not sure if I'm quite happy with this yet, since it is a 4k info dump, but I'm going to move onto the next chapter and come back to this before I officially post it to the Archive ... I want to be sure that I have a buffer this time so that I'm not two years between updates again. Baby steps of getting back into writing, I suppose. A massive 4K baby step ...

( cut for space )

Title: Untitled
Prompt: "It's not just that you're different - it's that you're not the same"
Characters: Prowl, Smokescreen
Fandom: Transformers: G1 (Pre-Earth)
Author's Note: I wanted to try to force myself to write at least one piece a month this year. Last month I wrote Pickman's Model for the Snowflake Challenge and this month's entry is written in response to a 31_Days prompt. I have more work to do on this before it's well and truly done and I think that it will eventually be part of You Remind Me Of Someone I Used To Know.

"You want to tell me why?" Smokescreen asked as soon as the door to Prowl's office closed behind him.

"Why what?" Prowl asked, never looking up from his data pad. His tone was dismissive on the surface, but Smokescreen could see the way Prowl’s doors nearly vibrated against their forced stillness.

“There was a time when we were close,” Smokescreen said. “Now you can barely stand to be in the same room as me. You want to tell me why that is?”

“I do not,” Prowl replied. “I am otherwise occupied. Please leave.”

Smokescreen sighed and sat in one of the guest chairs.

“I have three jobs here, Prowl. I help support Ratchet. I help support Jazz. And I help support you. I can’t effectively complete thirty-three point three percent of my duties if you keep refusing to deal with me.”

Prowl muttered something subvocally.

( Continues under the cut )