an antipathy to space travel

[hedda62]

OMG done and posted (in time for me to go out of town).

Sparrow, I-don't-even-know-where-this-came-from "Person of Interest"/Vorkosiverse crossover. OTP, people.

ImpSec analyst Harold Finch and ex-Armsman John Reese are both lonely outsiders; together, they fight crime. Though that will change, if Simon Illyan has anything to say about it. (I don't know; I needed a summary. Cordelia and Bothari are in it too.)

It is possible that only yunitsa and philomytha will read this; that would be enough for me. But I did make an attempt to be more expository in my writing so that people from either fandom could wander in and enjoy the wackiness (with high moral overtones). And I had SUCH FUN writing it; I can't even tell you.

Comments

[philomytha]

I am deeply in favour of Simon Illyan Is The New Black, but Finch and Reese are very shiny and fascinating too (and also, yes, I have now seen Finch pour a large bag of cash onto a table and will happily agree with Oh, Mr Finch).

[hedda62]

Yay! And oh, Mr. Finch.

[ailis_fictive]

Since I'm going through and taking a look at who found and liked the piece I just posted, I'm wandering by to say:

I read "Sparrow"--though admittedly, sort of accidentally, not realizing it was a crossover!--liked it a lot, and you may have suckered me into watching PoI. Drat it. But it seems to have *really worked* as a crossover, which probably means I'll like the other half of the combo too...

[hedda62]

Hee, and oh, I hope you do, we need more victims. Um, fellow fans. And thank you!

(And not to blow horns or anything, but since you seem to be a fellow Gregor fan, I do have a whole lot of Gregor fic on AO3 from last year...)

[ailis_fictive]

...I have in fact read All The Vorkosigan Fic on Ao3. Since the beginning of October (my husband has this line about the number of sssssses in obsessive that he's been trotting out a lot lately.) I'm still trying to pin authors to stories, now that I've...ah, broken cover, and am interacting with people--and I was mostly not commenting on Ao3 until I got an account (which will be tomorrow when I have time to set it up, thanks to a spare invite from philomytha) so that the comments would be linked with my identity-to-be.

But (rummage, rummage, rummage) oh my yes, you wrote the Lion's Cub series. eeeee! I *loved* that. Ekaterine being badass, and oh poor Aral, and the Nautical Incident. And then Fathers and Sons...I have a *huge* weakness for Gregor-find-out-about-Escobar, and this is one of my favorites. You do Miles so very very well (so far I've avoided trying to write him, as he tends to be rather opaque to me), and...just eeeeee! Simon, and Macbeth run amok, and Aral's relationship with feelings (I laughed and laughed and LAUGHED) and then...

I'm talking with a couple of folks, over in my journal, about the THING about loyalty and fealty and oaths that tends to run through this fandom. It's been an obsession of mine since childhood. (Really. I was seven or eight when it started--with Robin Hood...) Gregor and Miles, at the end...that wasn't so much hitting the nail on the head as hitting the ball out of the *park*. I do medieval re-creation and, in what is somewhere between a communal performance piece and a game, it is sometimes contextually appropriate (or required) to swear an oath of fealty/service. (Um, I can go on at absurd length about this, with historical footnotes and all. I'm trying not to...) So I've given my fealty, as squire to a knight and as woman-of-rank/royal servant to king and queen. And I once had the opportunity to serve as Queen myself, so I've *taken* oaths (including some from people to whom I had once sworn myself. Odd side-effect of the group structure, and...dizzying.). So..."the reassurance. The magic touch, if you will. It's absurd, but it means something." Yes. Yes. This. Yes. This.

Ah, which is to say, I really liked it!

(I'm also an intermittent Inspector Lewis junkie...I am very amused by the degree of overlap I am finding. I may possibly have watched Life Born of Fire twice in a *row*, and my favorite bits another three or four times over the next day. I'm trying to carve out some time to read a little more of the Inspector Lewis fic out there, especially yours, because I'm also a not-at-all-intermittent Shakespeare junkie. Did I mention the overlap? So I suspect I really *do* need to try PoI...)

[hedda62]

Well, the obsession sounds familiar; I've been a Vorkosigan fan for a long time and an on-and-off fic reader, but then the sudden All The Fic impulse came on me and I read... well, a lot, before I really started in writing it.

And that is cool about the stuff behind your Thing about oaths. I have a fairly big loyalty kink myself, although really I think identity is my elephant and the loyalty bit is a side-shoot of that, particularly in the Vorkosigan universe where it is so important. Though it's not unimportant in Lewis or PoI either.

And thank you for the compliments! "Fathers and Sons" is wholly and completely under the spell of "Aral Vorkosigan's Dog," of course, and last year's Gregor-and-Miles thing not, er, totally unrelated to this year's Aral-and-Simon thing. I love how fic-writing allows us to explore and indulge in this way - and oh my, the Vorkosigan fandom has a preponderance of good writers, though it always makes room for more. It does spoil one rather (the Lewis fandom is not bad. PoI fic, on the whole... well, more typical of fanfiction generally, I guess. Not that I can talk, having only contributed a couple of fluffy slash pieces (and the crossover), but I don't have time or energy for more. Really).

And I really like writing Miles, I find, once I take the plunge. It's that juicy combination of daring intelligence and self-identity blind spots.

Anyway, so very glad to have you with us!

[ailis_fictive]

I do wish I could remember how I wandered over! I'm pretty sure it was via dira's most recent Aral/Jole piece, but how I got linked to that in the first place, I can't think!

Identity. Yeah. I think you could make the argument that identity is often the root issue there. I also think I'm going to need to go recompile most of my brain; I've gotten about halfway though that thought a couple of times and never put it all together. Thanks. I think. :)

>"Fathers and Sons" is wholly and completely under the spell of "Aral Vorkosigan's Dog," of course

Aren't we all? I'm currently prodding at Aral/Simon myself, and having Thinky Thoughts about the way fanfic can function as a prism in a way that...well, more conventional storytelling has a harder time doing, though it still *does*. We can tell the same story over in different ways, illuminating different facets. (Criminal Minds does something similar, building a thematic fugue across multiple seasons--though...huh. That may be something that episodic TV, especially mysteries, can do. They're telling the same story over and over as well, though with a slightly stronger variability in the set dressing. There's an essay here, and I'm *NOT* writing it, blast it.)

I'm sure at some point I'll be bitten by a plot bunny that requires me to get over my fear of writing Miles, thought at the moment I'm busy killing him off in five different ways. (Mini-AUs. In between edits and housecleaning today, I'm trying to get Captain Vaagan to defect with one of the galactic doctors brought in during Ezar's final illness. Though typing this I've realized she probably can't be Escobaran or Betan, which...hmm.)

Thank you. Wheeeeeee!

[hedda62]

Hee, I see you got a start on writing the essay. Will attempt a reply there a bit later.

I do notice the writing-the-same-story thing, and the wealth in this fandom is how many versions and variants of the story we can tell, with all our individual writing preoccupations figuring in. It's great fun; it's more fun than the fandoms where the repeated story is getting the two main characters into bed, although I'm not saying that's not entertaining or occasionally deep. Just... less roomy.

One thing I noticed in writing "Sparrow" was the way I had to change the Reese and Finch characters to fit them into Barrayaran society, and how those changes were mostly about loyalty. In the show, Finch decidedly doesn't work for the government, making it easy for him to be a loner (his vast fortune doesn't hurt); Barrayar-Finch really had to work for ImpSec (because I don't think they have civilian contractors), which gives him a tie to Simon (and ultimately to Gregor and to Regent Aral) that pulls on his motivations. And Barrayar-Reese ended up with quite complex loyalty issues that aren't there in the original, where despite his military and CIA service his significant ties seem to be quite personal. So it's not just me; it's the world-building, I suppose is what I'm saying. :) Though it was really the idea of throwing Cordelia and her Betan sensibilities into the mix that got me to write it.

Killing Miles off in multiple ways actually seems quite tempting. You may have noticed, actually, how long it took me to start writing him into the Lion's Cub series. He has this very annoying tendency to take over any fic in which he is a character, and wriggle his way to the top.

[ailis_fictive]

Having not yet watched PoI, I don't have anything useful to say except that's interesting. I think there *are* stories to tell about Barrayar that don't hinge on loyalty, but it's a much more...reachable motivation in that world than in many others. (There's something about how this ties into the Vaagan piece I'm working on, but I don't want to try to poke at it too much because the story's at that malleable point where if I type too much about it, instead of typing *it*, I'll deform it.)

Cordelia and her Betan sensibilities are a fairly handy tool to use to illuminate Barrayar and its sensibilities...I'm thinking especially of Philomytha's new Post Facto, which I'm still processing.

I am both amused and heartened that even LMB seems to have trouble keeping Miles under control--since she had to shove him off-planet to keep him from throwing Captain Vorpatril's Alliance off-course.