Yuletide Shenanigans

[in_the_blue]

For a year when I almost didn't sign up for Yuletide, I sure had a lot of fun.

I mostly had fun in the Cowboy Bebop fandom. Let's see... in reverse writing order.

- lostinapapercup wanted time with Julia and Gren, and wanted to know what prompted Julia to talk to Gren about Spike, so she got my only Yuletide Madness story: Confession. What do you do for fun in a place as cold and snowy as Blue Crow? Build a snowman, of course, and feel like it's all just a dream.

- filigranka wanted an exploration of Spike and Vicious that wasn't romantic. As a treat, I wrote Initiative, which is a pre-canon piece about how Spike and Vicious met and became partners in the Red Dragons at the age of fifteen. This one has guest appearances by Mao Yenrai, Annie, the twins, Lin and Shin, and the city of Tharsis itself.

- tegopyon left the most beautiful prompt wanting to know more about what happened with Vicious and Gren on Titan. What attracted me to the prompt was that her letter outlined the way she thought Gren felt about Vicious, and it was the same as my thoughts on their relationship. How could I resist? I wrote The Music Box as another treat because I couldn't resist it. This also gave me a chance to dust off my long-lost RP muscles, since I used to RP both these characters at outpost_12. This story also features Julia.

- I wrote Forever Broke as a pinch hit for handlegg. The request was for Faye, Ed, and Jet post-canon and those of you familiar with Bebop know how fraught with peril that can be, from the whole "it was all just a dream I couldn't wake up from" school of thought to "they never got together again" to "no, he didn't really die" and on and on. I went with my gut and with my own interpretation of the end of canon, and picked up 2 days post-canon with Faye and Jet trying to come to terms with the events of Real Folk Blues. Faye is her usual prickly self and Jet reminisces about the way he met Spike and in the meantime, Ed is off on a search of her own. I haven't written these three characters a lot and I almost didn't volunteer for this pinch hit because the concept of writing post-canon was pretty scary, but I'm so glad I wrote this. I'm especially fond of Jet's long narrative section.

And now for something completely different...

- My yuletide assignment was for elegantpi, who requested a fic for Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris that included Gil, Gabrielle, Gertrude Stein, Salvador Dalí, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway. But no pressure, right? She also said she was intrigued by the time-travel aspects of the film and had a few what-if scenarios in her request, and this was so much fun to play with. The finished story is We'll Always Have Paris, in which I play fast and loose with all sorts of people skipping back and forth in time, in Paris, looking for their own golden era. For good measure I threw in a small dose of TS Eliot, because I could.

I want to thank deadcellredux (now that things are revealed) for writing me my gorgeous Baccano! story, Nice Holystone and Jacuzzi Splot Awkwardly Continue to Keep Their Relationship Professional, Despite Explosions of A Quiet and Emotional Sort. If you like Nice Holystone and Jacuzzi Splot and haven't read this yet, go do it! It's everything the name promises.

Also, thank you to lostinapapercup and ladysingsthe for beta reading for me. ♥♥♥