Jul. 19th, 2020 11:51 am
Sunday Six
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thrillingdetectivetalesIt's been awhile since I did a Sunday Six but for once in my life I'm on-track with my writing deadlines so I thought it might be a good moment to dip back in and give y'all a taste of stuff I've been working on.
Chuck fic from the POV of Alex McHugh, in the aftermath of finding out her presumed dead father is actually a spy.
She can sort of see how the young man in the photograph might evolve to become Mr. Casey, after twenty-odd years of hard living on the periphery of the civilized world. It still seems scarier somehow to consider that Mr. Casey might have been telling the truth than it is to assume he’s just a mentally unstable loner in a moment of crisis.
She backs out of the webpage and does another search, this time for “John Casey.” The first hit is a Wikipedia page about a novelist, followed by a series of listings for businessmen, investors, even a professional artist, but none of them are the Mr. Casey who comes into the Pie Shack a couple times a week and asks Alex benign, sporadic questions about her life while he works his way through a slice of the Shack’s best-selling homestyle apple.
She tries “John Casey U.S. government,” which leads her to a variety of Caseys serving in various capacities throughout the democratic system, and then, feeling remarkably foolish, “John Casey spy,” which is an unsurprising bust. She’s not sure whether it ought to count as a point in favor of Mr. Casey telling the truth that she can’t find any mention of him on the internet, or if it ought to count against him, so she decides to reserve judgment for the time being.
Suits fic, where Mike has a minor collision with a car, has some mild amnesia, and accidentally concludes that Harvey is his sugar daddy.
Mike wakes up to a dry mouth and a splitting headache, with a thoroughly pissed off menswear model sitting at his bedside. He’s not sure where he is, exactly, or why he’s here. The familiar sounds and nearby medical instruments suggest a hospital, but Mike is having trouble focusing enough to be sure. That should probably worry him, but the mystery of his current whereabouts is being overshadowed somewhat by the steady lance of his heartbeat through his temples and the GQ centerfold who appears to be keeping vigil over his slumbering form.
The man is offensively handsome in an immaculate three-piece suit, with slicked-back hair and dark, somber eyes trained somewhere in the middle distance. He’s scowling and scrubbing at his jaw with one hand, sunk back into a vaguely beige-colored armchair like he’s been sitting there for awhile. There’s something familiar about him, which is strange, because Mike doesn’t recall ever having seen him before.
Hannibal fic, where Will winds up in the BSHCI instead of Hannibal and Clarice Starling gets sent to interview him.
“I see you have a subscription to Tattlecrime.”
Mr. Graham doesn’t look up. “You sound surprised.”
“You just don’t strike me as the type to indulge tabloid journalism, that’s all,” Clarice offers.
Mr. Graham makes a soft, bitter snorting sound, the jagged ghost of a laugh, and cants his head to catalogue the contents of the opposite page. "Tawdry and overwrought though her prose may be, let it never be said that Freddie Lounds lacks commitment to detail."
A scene from a currently discontinued Leverage OT3 fic that I had planned to write for an exchange before Hannibal ate my brain.
It was only after they’d been escorted out of the second Sur La Table in as many weeks that Alec was willing to concede they might be staring down the barrel of a problem. A big one, with a capital P.
“You will be refunded for your remaining classes,” a dour-faced woman scowled at him from beneath her severe, graying mom bob. She had a nametag pinned to her breast that read ‘Amanda,’ and she was supposed to be teaching Alec and Parker—and a class full of bored housewives and other young couples—all the joys of homemade Italian food.
Parker, off to Alec’s left, bent over to wring watery bolognese sauce out of her hair.
“But as it has become abundantly clear that our program is not suited to your needs, we request that you pursue your culinary education elsewhere.” She nodded at Alec and wrinkled her nose at Parker, who had raised the twisted plait up to her face to give it a cautious sniff. “Good day.”
“I smell like spaghetti,” Parker complained, frowning as the door swung shut on Amanda’s back.
“Spaghetti’s delicious,” Alec said, sidling up beside her and curling an arm around her shoulders. “Ergo.” He made a gesture in the air.
“I don’t smell delicious.” Parker was quick to assert, rolling her eyes and leaning into Alec’s side. “Your corollary thing is broken.”
“Correlation,” Alec corrected, giving her a little squeeze and a gentle shake. “It’s correlation and causation, and I know you know that because we discussed it at length on that stakeout for the Johannes family last weekend when you were supposed to be working out the physics of a forty story zipline descent.”
Parker—who had executed that extraction on the fly without issue, employing the same masterful grace and troublingly cavalier disregard for her own personal safety as always—ignored him, electing instead to raise a hand to her mouth and chew at a hangnail on her thumb. “What are we gonna do?” she asked, eyes wide and trained sightlessly somewhere in the middle distance. “We only have three more weeks.”
Alec sighed. “I don’t know.” He reached up to scrub at the bridge of his nose with his free hand, only remembering after he’d let his arm drop back down to his side that he was spattered up to the elbow with flour and a lingering film of egg-wash.
Parker turned those baby blues on him, twisting her fingers in the fabric of his shirt. “Eliot couldn’t even teach us to cook, remember?”
Alec made a face, thinking back on his disastrous participation in Eliot’s fake-but-not-fake culinary class back during the French connection job. Granted, Alec had been more focused on his own integral contribution to that particular heist than on impressing anyone with his knife skills, but the cold truth of the matter was that, even in a highly controlled scenario, with an instructor whose competence in the kitchen rocketed past ‘admirable’ into ‘genuinely worrisome’ territory, Alec had comported himself with less dignity than he might have preferred.
Parker seemed to deflate while Alec was stuck wool-gathering. Her gaze flickered down to a distant patch of sidewalk, shoulders curling in. She shook her head, sauce-stained hair swinging, and said in a very small voice, “Maybe this was a bad idea.”
There are plenty of others in the works, but many of them are either still in very early stages or else are so short that if I'm going to share six lines I might as well post the fic in its entirety so they'll have to wait until the whole product is finished.
I hope everyone is having a good weekend!
She can sort of see how the young man in the photograph might evolve to become Mr. Casey, after twenty-odd years of hard living on the periphery of the civilized world. It still seems scarier somehow to consider that Mr. Casey might have been telling the truth than it is to assume he’s just a mentally unstable loner in a moment of crisis.
She backs out of the webpage and does another search, this time for “John Casey.” The first hit is a Wikipedia page about a novelist, followed by a series of listings for businessmen, investors, even a professional artist, but none of them are the Mr. Casey who comes into the Pie Shack a couple times a week and asks Alex benign, sporadic questions about her life while he works his way through a slice of the Shack’s best-selling homestyle apple.
She tries “John Casey U.S. government,” which leads her to a variety of Caseys serving in various capacities throughout the democratic system, and then, feeling remarkably foolish, “John Casey spy,” which is an unsurprising bust. She’s not sure whether it ought to count as a point in favor of Mr. Casey telling the truth that she can’t find any mention of him on the internet, or if it ought to count against him, so she decides to reserve judgment for the time being.
Mike wakes up to a dry mouth and a splitting headache, with a thoroughly pissed off menswear model sitting at his bedside. He’s not sure where he is, exactly, or why he’s here. The familiar sounds and nearby medical instruments suggest a hospital, but Mike is having trouble focusing enough to be sure. That should probably worry him, but the mystery of his current whereabouts is being overshadowed somewhat by the steady lance of his heartbeat through his temples and the GQ centerfold who appears to be keeping vigil over his slumbering form.
The man is offensively handsome in an immaculate three-piece suit, with slicked-back hair and dark, somber eyes trained somewhere in the middle distance. He’s scowling and scrubbing at his jaw with one hand, sunk back into a vaguely beige-colored armchair like he’s been sitting there for awhile. There’s something familiar about him, which is strange, because Mike doesn’t recall ever having seen him before.
“I see you have a subscription to Tattlecrime.”
Mr. Graham doesn’t look up. “You sound surprised.”
“You just don’t strike me as the type to indulge tabloid journalism, that’s all,” Clarice offers.
Mr. Graham makes a soft, bitter snorting sound, the jagged ghost of a laugh, and cants his head to catalogue the contents of the opposite page. "Tawdry and overwrought though her prose may be, let it never be said that Freddie Lounds lacks commitment to detail."
It was only after they’d been escorted out of the second Sur La Table in as many weeks that Alec was willing to concede they might be staring down the barrel of a problem. A big one, with a capital P.
“You will be refunded for your remaining classes,” a dour-faced woman scowled at him from beneath her severe, graying mom bob. She had a nametag pinned to her breast that read ‘Amanda,’ and she was supposed to be teaching Alec and Parker—and a class full of bored housewives and other young couples—all the joys of homemade Italian food.
Parker, off to Alec’s left, bent over to wring watery bolognese sauce out of her hair.
“But as it has become abundantly clear that our program is not suited to your needs, we request that you pursue your culinary education elsewhere.” She nodded at Alec and wrinkled her nose at Parker, who had raised the twisted plait up to her face to give it a cautious sniff. “Good day.”
“I smell like spaghetti,” Parker complained, frowning as the door swung shut on Amanda’s back.
“Spaghetti’s delicious,” Alec said, sidling up beside her and curling an arm around her shoulders. “Ergo.” He made a gesture in the air.
“I don’t smell delicious.” Parker was quick to assert, rolling her eyes and leaning into Alec’s side. “Your corollary thing is broken.”
“Correlation,” Alec corrected, giving her a little squeeze and a gentle shake. “It’s correlation and causation, and I know you know that because we discussed it at length on that stakeout for the Johannes family last weekend when you were supposed to be working out the physics of a forty story zipline descent.”
Parker—who had executed that extraction on the fly without issue, employing the same masterful grace and troublingly cavalier disregard for her own personal safety as always—ignored him, electing instead to raise a hand to her mouth and chew at a hangnail on her thumb. “What are we gonna do?” she asked, eyes wide and trained sightlessly somewhere in the middle distance. “We only have three more weeks.”
Alec sighed. “I don’t know.” He reached up to scrub at the bridge of his nose with his free hand, only remembering after he’d let his arm drop back down to his side that he was spattered up to the elbow with flour and a lingering film of egg-wash.
Parker turned those baby blues on him, twisting her fingers in the fabric of his shirt. “Eliot couldn’t even teach us to cook, remember?”
Alec made a face, thinking back on his disastrous participation in Eliot’s fake-but-not-fake culinary class back during the French connection job. Granted, Alec had been more focused on his own integral contribution to that particular heist than on impressing anyone with his knife skills, but the cold truth of the matter was that, even in a highly controlled scenario, with an instructor whose competence in the kitchen rocketed past ‘admirable’ into ‘genuinely worrisome’ territory, Alec had comported himself with less dignity than he might have preferred.
Parker seemed to deflate while Alec was stuck wool-gathering. Her gaze flickered down to a distant patch of sidewalk, shoulders curling in. She shook her head, sauce-stained hair swinging, and said in a very small voice, “Maybe this was a bad idea.”
There are plenty of others in the works, but many of them are either still in very early stages or else are so short that if I'm going to share six lines I might as well post the fic in its entirety so they'll have to wait until the whole product is finished.
I hope everyone is having a good weekend!
Tags:
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your fault
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A friend prompted me with “Bev Has A Nice Day” on Tumblr and I’m absolutely turning it into a Bev Lives TM thing. Bless you for likewise enabling me with comments and flailing~
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BEV HAS A GOOD DAY
MIRIAM IS NOT A VERY LIMITED CRAFT BEER
That was SO fun! It hits one of my big fandom kinks? I guess it is, people transforming the original canon into AUs and fix-its and darker fic. (Starting way back in about 2002? 2001? when I thought, "Hmm, maybe some of those online fans have written some hot Spike/Buffy sex scenes that aren't about how bad she feels....")