December Daily: Tropes for a bad day

goss prompts::: "Are there particular fics (or tropes) you read when you're having a bad day?"

AO3 tracks history, but I don't find any way to sort by frequency. Even if I could, I've messed it up by having several stories open on my phone for months on end without getting around to reading them, so that there are stories in there that AO3 thinks I've read 37 times ... Anyhow, I couldn't identify my top re-reads, but I immediately found two great and representative comfort reads.

Everything dira writes is good, but about two-thirds of her stories are in the High Quality But Not For Me category for squick reasons -- very few of us are engaging with our id on Dira's level. The other third are For Me in an intensely satisfying and comforting way. One I go back to a lot is Treasured, in which Bucky is a dragon and Steve is an offering.

Another frequent read is helenish's Pre-Existing Condition, a Die Hard universe story in which John and Matt get married for health insurance purposes.

The two stories are in the trope category where you have two people who aren't enemies but also aren't particularly attached to each other, and they spend a good bit of time taking care of each other before the relationship develops into romance. I eat that stuff up and would really love any and all recs (fannish or non).


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