rthstewart (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rthstewart) wrote2021-01-05 09:00 am
rthstewart) wrote2021-01-05 09:00 am
Entry tags:
But wait, there's more, Gift Fic
As a thank you to my amazing friends who did the TSG Calendar, with LARM being the chief instigator, I wrote a short fic that was posted and then AO3 crashed last night. Does anyone know what the cause was? LARM said something about it being a Mando fic? I saw Tumblr going on about Chapter 10 of something called Heat Wave.
In any event, this is Susan and Tebbitt. It took me FOREVER to get it going -- absolutely demoralizing to stare at 400 words for 2 days. And then I got them out of Ukraine and it finally started to move. I go back to this part of the world a lot for my espionage because I lived there right after the wall came down and it's all still very vivid. We never made it all the way to Ukraine, though our colleagues did. The Balkans were a very very strange place in those days.
The city that they are in, Dnipropetrovsk, now Dnipro, was a "closed" city by sometime in the early 1950s because of the manufacturing and in particular its contributions to the Soviet defense programs and ICBM development. I have no idea if spies actually moved along the river tributaries of the Black Sea and were I really serious about writing this as a genuine spy novel, that would require a lot of research.
I posted on Twitter that I'd originally put the mole in here as their reasoning for what's going on at the start but I took it out because it's not really the focus. The story paints Tebbitt as wildly patriotic and with both of them yearning for home. Part of the refrain in his head at one point is White Cliffs of Dover, an expressly pro England poem, rousing the US to fight Nazi bucketheads.
I've said before how influenced I was by Le Carre (RIP) one of those authors that I read certain passages and think wow, that's why I'll never be a professional writer (and also where I learned the bad habit of wandering point of view) but there's a terrific line by Connie Sachs bemoaning what happened to their lost generation, "Poor loves. Trained to Empire, trained to rule the waves" and dwelling on that magnitude of that betrayal for people like Tebbitt and Susan is just gutting. White men of certain class and education just weren't supposed to sell out their friends, lovers, and colleagues to Commies. It Just Wasn't Done. And the betrayal was so deeply and profoundly shocking, the establishment knew and ignored it because they collectively just couldn't bear to face it.
I'd always had that betrayal in the back of my head, that Susan and Tebbitt and Edmund and others were devoting themselves to something that was rotten to the core. It's why Asim, with his literal outsider view, sees more clearly and continually warns, do not assume that white men of a certain class and education are also loyal and competent. and "even if trustworthy, which I would not assume, they may still be fools." And so that sense of horrific betrayal all comes into a clear focus here -- Tebbitt and Susan's devotion, sacrifice, and deep patriotism are given over wholly to an institution that values maintaining its own internalized myth more than their lives.
There's A LOT going on here. Thank you!
Home Thoughts, From Abroad (5348 words) by rthstewart
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis, Chronicles of Narnia - All Media Types
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Susan Pevensie/Original Male Character(s)
Characters: Susan Pevensie, Lucy Pevensie
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Cold War, Spare Oom, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Alternate Universe - rthverse, Original Character(s), Original Character(s) - Reginald Tebbitt
Series: Part 11 of The Stone Gryphon
Summary:
In any event, this is Susan and Tebbitt. It took me FOREVER to get it going -- absolutely demoralizing to stare at 400 words for 2 days. And then I got them out of Ukraine and it finally started to move. I go back to this part of the world a lot for my espionage because I lived there right after the wall came down and it's all still very vivid. We never made it all the way to Ukraine, though our colleagues did. The Balkans were a very very strange place in those days.
The city that they are in, Dnipropetrovsk, now Dnipro, was a "closed" city by sometime in the early 1950s because of the manufacturing and in particular its contributions to the Soviet defense programs and ICBM development. I have no idea if spies actually moved along the river tributaries of the Black Sea and were I really serious about writing this as a genuine spy novel, that would require a lot of research.
I posted on Twitter that I'd originally put the mole in here as their reasoning for what's going on at the start but I took it out because it's not really the focus. The story paints Tebbitt as wildly patriotic and with both of them yearning for home. Part of the refrain in his head at one point is White Cliffs of Dover, an expressly pro England poem, rousing the US to fight Nazi bucketheads.
I've said before how influenced I was by Le Carre (RIP) one of those authors that I read certain passages and think wow, that's why I'll never be a professional writer (and also where I learned the bad habit of wandering point of view) but there's a terrific line by Connie Sachs bemoaning what happened to their lost generation, "Poor loves. Trained to Empire, trained to rule the waves" and dwelling on that magnitude of that betrayal for people like Tebbitt and Susan is just gutting. White men of certain class and education just weren't supposed to sell out their friends, lovers, and colleagues to Commies. It Just Wasn't Done. And the betrayal was so deeply and profoundly shocking, the establishment knew and ignored it because they collectively just couldn't bear to face it.
I'd always had that betrayal in the back of my head, that Susan and Tebbitt and Edmund and others were devoting themselves to something that was rotten to the core. It's why Asim, with his literal outsider view, sees more clearly and continually warns, do not assume that white men of a certain class and education are also loyal and competent. and "even if trustworthy, which I would not assume, they may still be fools." And so that sense of horrific betrayal all comes into a clear focus here -- Tebbitt and Susan's devotion, sacrifice, and deep patriotism are given over wholly to an institution that values maintaining its own internalized myth more than their lives.
There's A LOT going on here. Thank you!
Home Thoughts, From Abroad (5348 words) by rthstewart
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis, Chronicles of Narnia - All Media Types
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Susan Pevensie/Original Male Character(s)
Characters: Susan Pevensie, Lucy Pevensie
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Cold War, Spare Oom, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Alternate Universe - rthverse, Original Character(s), Original Character(s) - Reginald Tebbitt
Series: Part 11 of The Stone Gryphon
Summary:
A mission to Dnipropetrovsk to uncover Soviet ballistic missile manufacturing goes badly awry for Mrs. Susan Caspian (code name Rat, aka Susan Pevensie) and her partner, Robert Browning (code name Scribe aka WC (retired) Reginald Tebbitt).
Detective LARM on the hunt!
Heat Waves is an RPF fic about two youtubers who do Minecraft livestreams. (Annoyingly, the term youtube fandom has come into common parlance to describe the community that ships people who have youtube channels, which. Misnomer!!! Youtube is a BIG PLACE.) They are two young, cute boys (one is British and one is American) who play games together. They have a sweet friendship and fun chemistry which has of course led to 40K words of M/M. I think they may have been livestreaming in the hours before the crash. The snowball of viewers -- possibly in the thousands? idc to research this part -- all being directed together to the new Chapter 10 update last night is almost certainly what brought AO3 down.
I was going to say that the most remarkable thing about Heat Waves is its overwhelming 16K comments. SERIOUSLY, WHILE I WAS WRITING THIS, IT WENT OVER THE 15K THRESHOLD. But, then I read the first paragraph and I literally could not resist quoting. I might read it now tbh.
A gentle glow from the computer screen washes over the dark desk, colors flickering in rapid motion. The monitor whirs in self defense of the growing heat. The ceiling fan lays mockingly silent in the stifling air. Reclined in his seat, Dream’s head is tilted back to watch the wooden slats for the slightest tremor. Betrayal. Beads of sweat collect near his hairline. He tugs absently on the sticky plastic of his headphones, where they rest around his neck. The small light on the exterior blinks green.
Re: Detective LARM on the hunt!