Res ipsa loquitur

[Podfic] Reel (40 words) by SEF_podfic
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: due South
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Benton Fraser/Ray Kowalski
Characters: Benton Fraser, Ray Kowalski
Additional Tags: Romance, Dancing, Podfic, Audio Format: Streaming, Podfic Length: 10-20 Minutes, Audio Format: MP3
Summary:

Real life is confusing, but a dancer always knows where he's supposed to be. [podfic version]

I'm recovering from Covid and my dreams are very strange. Last night I had an uncommonly vivid visual scene: RayK slouching on his couch while Fraser, with an ASMR level of meditative slowness, wiped his (Ray's) face clean of a full face of theatrical makeup.

Privacy (4540 words) by Resonant
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: due South
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Benton Fraser/Ray Kowalski
Characters: Benton Fraser, Ray Kowalski
Additional Tags: Romance, First Time, Post-Canon, Back to Chicago, fun with refractory periods
Summary:

“Guess it’s a while since you had a door with a lock on it?”

“I’ve never had a door with a lock on it."

Yeah, I can't believe it, either -- I haven't written an all-new story since 2014, and I'm incredibly relieved that I can still do it.

Thanks to fox for beta, and also for a couple of years of shared squee and general enabling.

storiesforsorries - Top five due South fanfics

Aw, man, I don't think I can do that. AO3 has 13,375 works in the due South tag, and that's not even counting all the ones that got lost on account of this being a pre-AO3 fandom and mostly having played out on mailing lists and early LiveJournal. I strongly recommend thefourthvine's due South tag for a list of recs that is, if not comprehensive, at least large. (Not to mention entertaining.)

Instead I'm going to point you at five stories I loved when I came back from first a period of being out of this fandom and then a period of being out of all fandom.

I should warn you that I'm reading a lot of Ray/Ray and a lot of Ray/Fraser/Ray because reasons.

Thursdays by spuffyduds. Ray/Ray. Grim and painful. Note dubious consent tag.

Out of Nowhere by helens78. Ray/Fraser/Ray. Two things I almost never see in the same story: people doing kink, and people having fun.

Inclement by Scribe. Ray/Ray. Very short, teen, in which Vecchio can more or less fit Kowalski in that long overcoat with him.

This Is How We Learn To Light a Fire by DesireeArmfeldt. Fraser/Kowalski. Exactly what the title says, plus a lot of other things too.

Takes A Pet Like No Problem by gloss. Fraser/Kowalski, very short, teen, covers the familiar stages of resigning yourself to whatever it is that Fraser has gotten you into this time.



Leave me a comment to add a prompt to the calendar. The current list is below the cut.


( Read more... )

Forgotten joys of due South fandom.

I myself have some older stories that embarrass me a bit when people draw attention to them.

So if you've gotten 88 kudos from me on 1,200-word Due South stories you wrote when you still wore shoes with no arch support, I apologize for any awkwardness.

Does it help to know that your stories that made me happy before Y2K have just made me happy again?

You know, the longer I spend in post-menopausal word loss --

"if you don't live in a country with an active -- aw, hell, I've lost the word -- not royalty, not monarchy, not oligarchy, the thing where some people have better blood than other people --"

"Aristocracy?"

"Thank you!"

-- the more familiar it looks to me when Ray Kowalski says "the Northwest Areas" or starts the Miranda statement and then loses his place and trails off.

(Due South content in 2022 is thanks to fox, who KNOWS WHY.)

If y'all were wondering, my Frances-inspired Christmas dinner turned out lovely. I had ham with maple syrup and seedy mustard, and potato gratin with thyme, and panisdead's Moroccan-spiced butternut squash, and a homemade roll, and a few raw sugar snap peas, and a navel orange, and I did my best to make them come out even. The pecan pie I bought from Imperfect Foods turned out to be a bust, but I didn't really have any appetite left for it anyway.

I'm feeling kind of done with Christmas, though. Most years I'm a bit of a crank about the dates -- I want the tree up on St. Nicholas Day (December 6) and down on Epiphany (January 6) -- but this year I started early due to all the ... everything.

I've got one more vacation day tomorrow, so I've designated that to be this year's Last Day of Christmas. I'm going to play the music one more time, make some molasses cookies, take down the tree and the kidlet's nativity set, put away the wrapping paper, and get on with Clean The Insides of Things January.

-----


ride4ever - "for any dS or C6D pairing that you ship, how that ship is doing in 2020."

I talked about Fraser and Ray a while back, so let's talk about Vecchio and Stella.

To be honest, I seriously doubt that a full-pay police pension still exists in 2020, golden bullet or no golden bullet. It doesn't matter very much, though, because in my head that bowling alley he and Stella open is incredibly successful.

It's so successful that it's constantly being investigated for arms smuggling, money laundering, etc., because nobody can believe that a former detective (though admittedly very funny and well dressed) and a former prosecutor (though admittedly very smart and pretty) could possibly be doing this well with a bowling alley that's actually nothing but a bowling alley.

When they open a new, expanded bowling alley with restaurant and dance hall, Stella has to talk Ray out of naming it The Front Organization.






reginagiraffe - "Hermione/Harry/Ron from Bed and Board in 2020"

laurenthemself -- "What grammatical (or punctuation, spelling) hill would you die on?"

ride_4ever if you are a maker of New Year's resolutions, post at least one -- if you are not, then comment about the concept of New Year's resolutions OR write a snippet-sized list of New Year's resolutions from the POV of one dSC6D character.









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Happy birthday, ride4ever! "Storyish prompt: for any due South fic you've written, write a prequel or sequel snippet for the fic or meta about the before-or-after that can be imagined about the fic's story arc."

I'm glad you included prequels as an option, because I never realized how many of my stories relied on being able to srap everything up and send the guys off to ride away in a dogsled!

Housekeeping presupposes that Fraser and Ray have made a tacit decision that they're not going to pair up no matter how much they want to. They even come back early from the north without the hand of Franklin, which otherwise they totally would have found, I'm sure.

So conceivably you could have a prequel that was nothing but near misses. Stakeouts in the car where the conversation is punctuated by longer and longer pauses just looking at each other. The mysterious frequency with which they find themselves in the same storage closet, the same empty interview room, the same very small men's room. Shouting at each other across a table full of evidence and wondering how their mouths got so close together. Ray wakes up in the tent spooning Fraser and rolls quickly away, and then Fraser wakes up spooning Ray and rolls quickly away.

Kind of like the canon, only more so.

It could go on for so long that later both of them have scenes in their minds that they're not 100% confident whether they really happened or whether they were just very vivid fantasies. So, like, if you asked them to describe their first kiss, they might give different answers.




( Prompts and How To Leave One - behind cut )

muccamukk reminded me that it's time for the December Daily posting meme! (This suggests that, though it doesn't feel like it, time is actually passing.)

I've done this for a couple of years now and it's always fun.

Specify a date if you want; otherwise I'll just answer them whenever.

This year, in addition to the usual kinds of questions, I'd also love to get storyish prompts. Storyish meaning you never know what you might get: two sentences of a story, or a description of a story that will never exist, or a love song about how much I like that trope, or a rant about my pet peeve about that trope, or I know nothing about that canon except what I see on social media and here's what I think it might be about, or Ten Reasons Why I Love/Hate/Am Indifferent To that character, canon, or trope, or ...

As always, I'd love to hear about it if you're doing the meme too.

1. krait - "I pick December first, and will start things off with some backward reflection: Talk about a fandom you're no longer active in."
2. mific - "what about the Wraith in Stargate Atlantis? Ever tempted to write John/Wraith fic?"
3. clevermanka - "How are Brian Johnson and John Bender are doing these days?"
4. pauraque - "Something fannish (a character, a ship, a show, a trope) that you initially disliked, but that grew on you. What changed?"
5. terminally_underwhelmed - "What's a popular trope that doesn't do much for you, and an unpopular one you love?"
6. runpunkrun - "something you recently learned about yourself"
7. muccamukk - "Favourite power couple(s) and what makes them work so well together. Can be storyish or not."
8.
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10. mific - "what about crossovers? Have you written any?"
11.
12. marginaliana - ghost stories
13. runpunkrun - "a new thing you tried "
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15. - Guardian as described by someone who only knows it via social media
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17. ride4ever's birthday prompt - "Storyish prompt: for any due South fic you've written, write a prequel or sequel snippet for the fic or meta about the before-or-after that can be imagined about the fic's story arc."
18. mific - "the genderswap trope where a character's gender is changed. Yes? No? Maybe?"
19. runpunkrun - "fake dating: yes or no"
20. minoanmiss - "One of my favorite tropes is Then Let Me Be Evil. What do you think of it/have you explored it/so on and so forth?"
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22.
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24. runpunkrun - "John and Rodney in 2020"
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