Candy Hearts 2024 Exchange Letter
Jan. 1st, 2024 07:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skazkaIt's Candy Hearts time again! As usual, I talk way too much in exchange letters -- use as much or as little as you want from these prompts, I can't wait to see what you share!
General likes:
- hookups coming before feelings
- one-night stands and anonymous sex turned not-so-anonymous
- loving but deeply weird relationships
- pining, whether requited or unrequited
- ghosts, monsters, the supernatural
- loyalty kink, either big selfless gestures or low-key attentiveness
- pet sociopaths — morally-dubious characters doing the dirty deeds their more morally upstanding lovers cannot, or needing to be restrained from doing so
- Pining and characters doing deeply strange things due to pining
- Complicated feelings -- characters who can't say or even think the truth about how they feel, tongue-tied lovers, pining, love/hate, enemies-to-lovers, enemies-to-friends-to-lovers, lovers-to-enemies-to-lovers-again, etc.
- Film noir tropes and AUs (hardboiled narration, doom and double-crosses, femmes fatales, gunsels)
- any other kind of genre fusion -- campy 80s slasher horror? Summer camp romp? 90s YA novel? Gothic horror?
- Fucked-up courtships -- mind games, fighting as foreplay, surveillance and obsessions from afar, villains in love with heroes and vice versa. This can be silly (think Kate Beaton's Nemesis comics) or more serious.
- Noncon and dubcon -- power plays, trying to bargain for advantages or escape worse consequences using sex, trying to defuse a dangerous situation using sex, fights and captivity scenarios that take a bad turn, villain-on-hero noncon.
- shady pasts
- parental hangups
- secret meetings and trysts
- road trips, traveling together
- partners in crime
- hurt/comfort and whump
- murder: murdering your lover, murdering people on behalf of your lover, major character death
- fuckups in love
- always-a-girl genderswap (especially when leading to butch characters and f/f pairings!)
I love fic with trans characters, especially if characters retain their canon gender expressions as trans people. This and genderswap can be a total freebie on top of any other AU too. I'm down for crossovers/fusions, AUs of all kinds (especially high-concept/fanciful/historical AUs), and unusual formats, whatever that may mean to you. All of the following prompts are totally optional and just there to get the gears turning; if none of them work for you, feel free to take off in a different direction.
This year I don't have remotely enough art prompts but I'd love to receive art as treats -- you can see some of my likes below.
For art, I'm down for anything from a vignette of the two characters interacting to a comic/illustration/fresco -- if it's a pairing who've met in canon, feel free to illustrate a passage you find particularly shippy or a missing scene! My prompts definitely lean more toward the narrative than the visual, but I really would be thrilled for anything visual with these pairings. Historical AUs/historical outfits will always delight me -- Regency! ancient Rome! 1940s! -- and any kind of genre pastiche mentioned above. I'm totally down with porny art and would love to see it.
Art likes:
- B&W and grayscale art, soft/muted colors.
- Visual pastiches of other art styles -- Edward Gorey, Aubrey Beardsley, Caravaggio, Vermeer, Goya, ukiyo-e prints, midcentury magazine illustrations, etc.
- Historical/setting AUs where the characters get to show off new clothes/settings/gear.
- Hairy chests, legs, and pits (on all genders). Men's legs and butts.
- Historical clothing and uniforms.
- Tarot motifs.
- Skulls! Skulls, skulls, skulls.
- For ship art, size differences and smaller characters taking a more dominant role (whether that's topping or in any other sense).
- Art of characters beaten up or scarred.
- Portraits/bust-style art.
Some spoilery content.
Smut likes:
- size differences (both size/weight/physique and in the dick department)
- partially-clothed or mostly-clothed sex
- oral sex, handjobs, frottage, intercrural
- characters who kink on violence (gunplay, face-slapping, choking, beating the hell out of each other or getting beaten up, etc.)
- on that note, sadomasochism (especially when it doesn’t follow strict sadist-dom-top, masochist-bottom-sub lines — masochistic doms, versatility and switching, etc.)
- impotence/erectile dysfunction
- casual fuckbuddies, sex for comfort, friends with benefits
- funny goofy fail!sex, dramatic dysfunctional fail!sex
- historical sexual practices and meeting places, cruising, queer subcultures
- fancy clothes and dressing/undressing
- angsty whumpy noncon/dubcon, conflicted manipulative dubcon
- class issues in the bedroom
- younger characters as sexual initiators/sexual aggressors
DNWs:
- self-harm, disordered eating
- unrequested child sexual abuse, incest, or suicide (offscreen mentions, past occurrences, and canonical instances are ok)
- overhearing a character masturbating
- noncanonical pregnancy
- racekink/raceplay
- omegaverse/BDSMverse/soulmate mark AUs
- ongoing RL crises and current events
I don't want to receive explicit fic involving characters under 16.
*
Blue Eye Samurai
I really love this show as a period revenge quest with a lot of heart and a lot going on around social status and identity -- I love the way Taigen's grudgingly proving himself to be a worthy opponent and ally to Mizu, with their moments of seriously fire-forged teamwork and surprising vulnerability, but the impact of his and his peers' bullying is still a part of why she's so fucked-up and fired up about her revenge. Meanwhile Akemi's trying to navigate what being a woman of her social class looks like for her and Mizu's whole deal -- as the asshole who spoiled her engagement to poor-boy-made-good Taigen, as a surly intractable killing machine, and someone whose relationship to gender and sexuality is all kinds of complicated -- is a great contrast with their respective conceptions of honor and integrity. Also they are all extremely hot and I love enemies-to-lovers of all stripes but I especially love enemies turned grudging allies so this series was very good to me. I'm requesting Mizu/Taigen and Mizu/Akemi separately but I ship all three in all configurations.
Mizu/Taigen
- Undercover as lovers with the wrinkle that Mizu’s public persona as a guy stays in place — whether Taigen is aware of her complicated gender situation at that point or not, the two of them have to pretend to be lovers bc of reasons, with Edo-era baggage around desire between men, status, and who gets to do what to whom.
- Grudging hurt-comfort in either direction! Illness recovery, bandaging wounds,
- Scenes from a situation where they're working together as allies. This ship has such great grudging cooperation — all the "you can't die now, you have to live long enough for me to kill you in a duel!" stuff and Taigen getting tortured for his refusal to give up Mizu was great for me — and I'd love to see more of it too.
- Snatched moments of closeness and peace on Mizu's road to revenge — bedsharing, cooking and eating together, late-night conversations.
- I love that these two have a shared track record with fully serious, life-altering combat and also Taigen popping a bone when they're grappling. Horny sparring! Adrenaline-fueled impulsive makeouts! Fighting their mutual enemies back to back and then getting down in the blood and wreckage!
Mizu/Akemi
- Akemi has to go undercover as a boy for whatever reason and Mizu gives her the crash course. (Can be before or after Akemi's let in on what's really going on with Mizu.)
- Fake relationship/undercover as lovers — maybe with Akemi starting to realize this "guy" isn’t so bad, maybe with her making Mizu’s life harder on purpose, maybe both. I love the levels of social class in this show and especially the way they impact Akemi’s life, so I’d love anything that plays with that aspect of public performance as well. (This can be combined with the previous prompt as well if you're feeling it.)
- A scene where Akemi's talents come in handy or where she gets to share them with Mizu, whether the skills she's been allowed to formally cultivate as a nice young noblewoman or the skills she's acquired under her own volition. (All that spicy poetry…)
- Ditto the above prompt about moments of peace, but with these two! Bedsharing on the road or in an inn, staying up late talking about their respective ambitions, etc. I'd also love one of them teaching the other something, especially if it's not something a well-mannered young lady like Akemi would need to know or something a tough battle-hardened woman of the road like Mizu has ever gotten to learn.
- Mizu serving as Akemi's bodyguard because of reasons — as a cover story abroad, or traveling within Japan with Mizu posing as Akemi's male chaperone?
I love the whole cast of this show and would be happy to see any other characters make appearances, especially Ringo, Madame Kaji and her girls, and poor Kinuyo.
Some associated smut tropes: stone top Mizu; women bottoming for anal; strap-ons and dildos (not just for Abijah Fowler any more!); fingering; oral sex; frottage; intercrural sex; mutual masturbation (both "getting your partner off with your hands" and "you and a partner both getting yourselves off in parallel" varieties); gender play and complicated historical attitudes around gender.
Fandom-specific DNW I don't want to receive stories with Mizu being traumatically outed as a woman to the public, or forced into adopting a conventionally feminine social role, and I'd prefer fics that don't center on Taigen/Akemi outright rejecting her if/when they find out. Wrt my raceplay/racekink DNW, I'm fine with fic that deals with racism but nothing with race-based humiliation in a sexual context.
*
NBC Hannibal
Coming back to this show ten years after the first season aired was an amazing way to be reminded how much Hannigram remains exactly my jam after all these years. I love the layers of animosity and betrayal and profound ethical conflict between them, but I also love all the ridiculous yearning -- how profoundly in need of comfort and understanding Will is in s1 and how Hannibal uses that ruthlessly, how Hannibal discovers his own loneliness and desire for a companion but is unfortunately divorced enough from the rest of humanity that creating his own perfect mate through force and persuasion seems like his only option to be truly seen. I love how they hurt each other, I love Hannibal's malicious whimsy, I love Will's twitchy intensity and his genuine moral concerns where Hannibal has none to speak of, and I'm especially interested in explorations of intimacy between them where Will's moral compass isn't completely subsumed to Hannibal's aesthetics and his free will isn't completely extinguished in the end. (Hannibal can sure try, though.)
Will Graham/Hannibal Lecter
- S1 canon divergence where Will and Hannibal get together in the aftermath of Hannibal's seeming attack by Tobias Budge — how would their dynamic change if Hannibal were able to leverage Will's protective instincts toward him in that moment? How might that throw a wrench in Hannibal's self-protective scheming?—
- Complicated H/C where Hannibal's the one having to receive physical caretaking from Will — in a perverse kind of way post-Matthew Brown, after tangling with the Vergers, after Dolarhyde? — but the emotional parts are… messy.
- A different kind of fraught seduction into violence — sadist Will feeling complicated about his capacity for getting off on cruelty + (sado)masochist Hannibal enthusiastic about giving him someone to be baroquely nasty to? Or anything with the weird frisson of horny violence Will's fantasies manifest toward Hannibal becoming a reality.
- Sex pollen? Sex pollen. I'd especially love it if sex pollen is a rare but known naturally-occurring phenomenon (carried by Stamets' corpse mushrooms? Katherine Pimms' ghoulish honey?) — does Hannibal leverage it as a way of getting closer to Will, or vice-versa? Are they both blindsided? Will helping Hannibal through it with a little spite in the mix? Does the fallout force an earlier-than-canon acknowledgment of their not-very-platonic feelings for one another?
- I am a simple soul and I love reading about noncon/dubcon and other ways sexuality and trauma can dovetail. S2-era sex as part of Will's honeypot maneuver or Hannibal's attempted seduction into artmurder, with ulterior motives and reservations; Will and Hannibal getting together after previous questionably-consensual encounters between them and it making everything after that very fraught and difficult; noncon recovery for either of them, including noncon that occurred pre-canon.
Fandom-specific DNWs: calling Will "William"; fluffy post-s3 Hannigram (conflicted, fucked-up post-s3 Hannigram is great!); serial killer!Will AUs; explicitly stating that Will's never been attracted to men before Hannibal.
Fic dealing with the s3-finale cliff plunge as a murder-suicide, Will having issues around food related to all the cannibalism and ear-forcefeeding, or the various forms of incestuous/quasi-incestuous desire in canon (Abigail and all her adult authority figures, the Vergers, Hannibal and Mischa, Hannibal and his tragic but elegant aunt Lady Not-Appearing-In-This-Adaptation) are all fine — consider them requested!
Some associated smut tropes: Consent issues; undernegotiated kink, both fun and fraught; clothed and mostly-clothed sex; dissociation during sex; rope bondage; biting and bruising; impact play; hickeys/bruises/impact marks as a mutually desired sign of affection; Will being mouthy and verbally nasty; taste and scent; body hair; sexual jealousy; post-argument sex.
*
Pilgrimage (2017)
Damn, there's really a theme of rough-meets-smooth in these ships so far but it's arguable which one is which here -- two dudes from two very different homosocial environments and two very different cultures, with Raymond's exquisite violence and daddy issues making a great contrast to helpless, harmless Diarmuid who's never been outside the monastery before and may be an actual orphan/child oblate. I love nasty things happening to Diarmuid (and nice ones!) but I also am intrigued by the potential for a closer understanding between them, if not necessarily an affectionate one, and an exploration of the clash of cultures going on at this historical moment.
Brother Diarmuid/Raymond De Merville
- Raymond makes Diarmuid his concubine and takes him back to England (or France) by force.
- Conversely, Raymond makes Diarmuid his """"""personal chaplain"""" and takes him back to England (or France) by force. In either case I'd love to see Diarmuid thrust into civilian clothes for the first time in his life and dealing with the very different social mores of Anglo-Norman society.
- Something with the scene between the two of them in the woods going further in a rapey direction.
- Any kind of weird hostage situation where Raymond begins to feel grudging affection/protectiveness for Diarmuid and hates it. (Whether or not Diarmuid starts to feel a reciprocal obligation toward his captor, and especially if not.)
- Hurt-comfort with Raymond giving Diarmuid medical attention, or vice versa. (I love Diarmaid and Ciaran's interest in herbalism in canon, so feel free to draw that out.) With villain ships, I really enjoy the villain having a legit pang of conscience now and again, if not necessarily enough to turn Diarmuid loose.
Some associated smut tropes: Size kink; clothed/mostly-clothed sex; intercrural sex; handjobs; casual homosocial bed-sharing (or forbidden, taboo bed-sharing) as a prelude to sex; all kinds of medieval sodomy hangups; surprisingly rough sex; surprisingly gentle sex; kissing and embracing as plausible-deniability foreplay; language kink and verbal humiliation.
*
The X-Files
Okay, this ship is fully just my love of resentful little rat fucks and their terrible yet vaguely pathetic bosses manifesting itself once more. Krycek is a twisty murderous delight (I ship him with everyone) and the Cigarette-Smoking Man is an icon of faceless, almost colorless institutional malignancy; together they start out as a nice dyadic embodiment of all the conspiratorial badness our heroes are struggling against, a classic evil boss/evil henchman pair, but that dynamic evolves rapidly over a lot of backstabbing and, well, ratfucking, and ultimately they're both at the mercy of forces greater than themselves. I love the semi-dismal personal lives they both have as a result of the stuff they're ensnared in, and I would like them to bone down, or at least suffer. (My TXF tastes favor the pre-2016-reboot canon and that shows here in my prompts but I'm happy to read stuff that incorporates plot and characterization from comics canon/audio dramas/later seasons as long as it's not totally unintelligible without it.)
Cigarette-Smoking Man/Alex Krycek
- The Cigarette-Smoking Man catches feelings for Krycek; Krycek is simultaneously absolutely incensed about it given the givens (their respective roles in the whole Sinister Government Conspiracy thing, the CSM's general reprehensibility, the fact that he's a pitiful wannabe-novelist well past middle age who's married to his lousy job…) and borderline touched by it. Very faintly. Like, a tiny bit. Or vice-versa — Krycek experiences one (1) feeling for the C-Man other than resentment and loathing and copes with it about as well as you'd think.
- All kinds of creepy weird consent issues in either direction (or volleying in both directions) — their professional relationship is plenty contentious and I'd love to see how the shifting balances of power and animosity versus grudging obligation could inform them fucking and/or fucking with each other.
- The Syndicate Made Them Do It: more consent issues but on somebody else's terms.
- Came Back Wrong fic! Something with Krycek's black oil encounter/silo experience seems like a great fit for this, with him seemingly surviving the encounter but being a little less human than when he got infected with goo. You can take this in a serious, fucked-up direction or an absurd porny one... or both? Idk.
- Honestly anything you can do to whump Krycek and/or inconvenience the Cigarette-Smoking Man would make me very happy. Super-grudging hurt-comfort, having to become extremely temporary allies knowing they're going to be back to murdering each other tomorrow, going on the run together…
Some associated smut tropes: smoking and cigarette kink (naturally) incl. cigarette burns; hatesex; noncon and dubcon; "the fact that we keep having sex is clearly meaningless and in fact you're the weird one if you question it"; oral sex and oral fixations.
General likes:
- hookups coming before feelings
- one-night stands and anonymous sex turned not-so-anonymous
- loving but deeply weird relationships
- pining, whether requited or unrequited
- ghosts, monsters, the supernatural
- loyalty kink, either big selfless gestures or low-key attentiveness
- pet sociopaths — morally-dubious characters doing the dirty deeds their more morally upstanding lovers cannot, or needing to be restrained from doing so
- Pining and characters doing deeply strange things due to pining
- Complicated feelings -- characters who can't say or even think the truth about how they feel, tongue-tied lovers, pining, love/hate, enemies-to-lovers, enemies-to-friends-to-lovers, lovers-to-enemies-to-lovers-again, etc.
- Film noir tropes and AUs (hardboiled narration, doom and double-crosses, femmes fatales, gunsels)
- any other kind of genre fusion -- campy 80s slasher horror? Summer camp romp? 90s YA novel? Gothic horror?
- Fucked-up courtships -- mind games, fighting as foreplay, surveillance and obsessions from afar, villains in love with heroes and vice versa. This can be silly (think Kate Beaton's Nemesis comics) or more serious.
- Noncon and dubcon -- power plays, trying to bargain for advantages or escape worse consequences using sex, trying to defuse a dangerous situation using sex, fights and captivity scenarios that take a bad turn, villain-on-hero noncon.
- shady pasts
- parental hangups
- secret meetings and trysts
- road trips, traveling together
- partners in crime
- hurt/comfort and whump
- murder: murdering your lover, murdering people on behalf of your lover, major character death
- fuckups in love
- always-a-girl genderswap (especially when leading to butch characters and f/f pairings!)
I love fic with trans characters, especially if characters retain their canon gender expressions as trans people. This and genderswap can be a total freebie on top of any other AU too. I'm down for crossovers/fusions, AUs of all kinds (especially high-concept/fanciful/historical AUs), and unusual formats, whatever that may mean to you. All of the following prompts are totally optional and just there to get the gears turning; if none of them work for you, feel free to take off in a different direction.
This year I don't have remotely enough art prompts but I'd love to receive art as treats -- you can see some of my likes below.
Some of my fanart likes
For art, I'm down for anything from a vignette of the two characters interacting to a comic/illustration/fresco -- if it's a pairing who've met in canon, feel free to illustrate a passage you find particularly shippy or a missing scene! My prompts definitely lean more toward the narrative than the visual, but I really would be thrilled for anything visual with these pairings. Historical AUs/historical outfits will always delight me -- Regency! ancient Rome! 1940s! -- and any kind of genre pastiche mentioned above. I'm totally down with porny art and would love to see it.
Art likes:
- B&W and grayscale art, soft/muted colors.
- Visual pastiches of other art styles -- Edward Gorey, Aubrey Beardsley, Caravaggio, Vermeer, Goya, ukiyo-e prints, midcentury magazine illustrations, etc.
- Historical/setting AUs where the characters get to show off new clothes/settings/gear.
- Hairy chests, legs, and pits (on all genders). Men's legs and butts.
- Historical clothing and uniforms.
- Tarot motifs.
- Skulls! Skulls, skulls, skulls.
- For ship art, size differences and smaller characters taking a more dominant role (whether that's topping or in any other sense).
- Art of characters beaten up or scarred.
- Portraits/bust-style art.
Some spoilery content.
Smut likes:
- size differences (both size/weight/physique and in the dick department)
- partially-clothed or mostly-clothed sex
- oral sex, handjobs, frottage, intercrural
- characters who kink on violence (gunplay, face-slapping, choking, beating the hell out of each other or getting beaten up, etc.)
- on that note, sadomasochism (especially when it doesn’t follow strict sadist-dom-top, masochist-bottom-sub lines — masochistic doms, versatility and switching, etc.)
- impotence/erectile dysfunction
- casual fuckbuddies, sex for comfort, friends with benefits
- funny goofy fail!sex, dramatic dysfunctional fail!sex
- historical sexual practices and meeting places, cruising, queer subcultures
- fancy clothes and dressing/undressing
- angsty whumpy noncon/dubcon, conflicted manipulative dubcon
- class issues in the bedroom
- younger characters as sexual initiators/sexual aggressors
DNWs:
- self-harm, disordered eating
- unrequested child sexual abuse, incest, or suicide (offscreen mentions, past occurrences, and canonical instances are ok)
- overhearing a character masturbating
- noncanonical pregnancy
- racekink/raceplay
- omegaverse/BDSMverse/soulmate mark AUs
- ongoing RL crises and current events
I don't want to receive explicit fic involving characters under 16.
*
Blue Eye Samurai
I really love this show as a period revenge quest with a lot of heart and a lot going on around social status and identity -- I love the way Taigen's grudgingly proving himself to be a worthy opponent and ally to Mizu, with their moments of seriously fire-forged teamwork and surprising vulnerability, but the impact of his and his peers' bullying is still a part of why she's so fucked-up and fired up about her revenge. Meanwhile Akemi's trying to navigate what being a woman of her social class looks like for her and Mizu's whole deal -- as the asshole who spoiled her engagement to poor-boy-made-good Taigen, as a surly intractable killing machine, and someone whose relationship to gender and sexuality is all kinds of complicated -- is a great contrast with their respective conceptions of honor and integrity. Also they are all extremely hot and I love enemies-to-lovers of all stripes but I especially love enemies turned grudging allies so this series was very good to me. I'm requesting Mizu/Taigen and Mizu/Akemi separately but I ship all three in all configurations.
Mizu/Taigen
- Undercover as lovers with the wrinkle that Mizu’s public persona as a guy stays in place — whether Taigen is aware of her complicated gender situation at that point or not, the two of them have to pretend to be lovers bc of reasons, with Edo-era baggage around desire between men, status, and who gets to do what to whom.
- Grudging hurt-comfort in either direction! Illness recovery, bandaging wounds,
- Scenes from a situation where they're working together as allies. This ship has such great grudging cooperation — all the "you can't die now, you have to live long enough for me to kill you in a duel!" stuff and Taigen getting tortured for his refusal to give up Mizu was great for me — and I'd love to see more of it too.
- Snatched moments of closeness and peace on Mizu's road to revenge — bedsharing, cooking and eating together, late-night conversations.
- I love that these two have a shared track record with fully serious, life-altering combat and also Taigen popping a bone when they're grappling. Horny sparring! Adrenaline-fueled impulsive makeouts! Fighting their mutual enemies back to back and then getting down in the blood and wreckage!
Mizu/Akemi
- Akemi has to go undercover as a boy for whatever reason and Mizu gives her the crash course. (Can be before or after Akemi's let in on what's really going on with Mizu.)
- Fake relationship/undercover as lovers — maybe with Akemi starting to realize this "guy" isn’t so bad, maybe with her making Mizu’s life harder on purpose, maybe both. I love the levels of social class in this show and especially the way they impact Akemi’s life, so I’d love anything that plays with that aspect of public performance as well. (This can be combined with the previous prompt as well if you're feeling it.)
- A scene where Akemi's talents come in handy or where she gets to share them with Mizu, whether the skills she's been allowed to formally cultivate as a nice young noblewoman or the skills she's acquired under her own volition. (All that spicy poetry…)
- Ditto the above prompt about moments of peace, but with these two! Bedsharing on the road or in an inn, staying up late talking about their respective ambitions, etc. I'd also love one of them teaching the other something, especially if it's not something a well-mannered young lady like Akemi would need to know or something a tough battle-hardened woman of the road like Mizu has ever gotten to learn.
- Mizu serving as Akemi's bodyguard because of reasons — as a cover story abroad, or traveling within Japan with Mizu posing as Akemi's male chaperone?
I love the whole cast of this show and would be happy to see any other characters make appearances, especially Ringo, Madame Kaji and her girls, and poor Kinuyo.
Some associated smut tropes: stone top Mizu; women bottoming for anal; strap-ons and dildos (not just for Abijah Fowler any more!); fingering; oral sex; frottage; intercrural sex; mutual masturbation (both "getting your partner off with your hands" and "you and a partner both getting yourselves off in parallel" varieties); gender play and complicated historical attitudes around gender.
Fandom-specific DNW I don't want to receive stories with Mizu being traumatically outed as a woman to the public, or forced into adopting a conventionally feminine social role, and I'd prefer fics that don't center on Taigen/Akemi outright rejecting her if/when they find out. Wrt my raceplay/racekink DNW, I'm fine with fic that deals with racism but nothing with race-based humiliation in a sexual context.
*
NBC Hannibal
Coming back to this show ten years after the first season aired was an amazing way to be reminded how much Hannigram remains exactly my jam after all these years. I love the layers of animosity and betrayal and profound ethical conflict between them, but I also love all the ridiculous yearning -- how profoundly in need of comfort and understanding Will is in s1 and how Hannibal uses that ruthlessly, how Hannibal discovers his own loneliness and desire for a companion but is unfortunately divorced enough from the rest of humanity that creating his own perfect mate through force and persuasion seems like his only option to be truly seen. I love how they hurt each other, I love Hannibal's malicious whimsy, I love Will's twitchy intensity and his genuine moral concerns where Hannibal has none to speak of, and I'm especially interested in explorations of intimacy between them where Will's moral compass isn't completely subsumed to Hannibal's aesthetics and his free will isn't completely extinguished in the end. (Hannibal can sure try, though.)
Will Graham/Hannibal Lecter
- S1 canon divergence where Will and Hannibal get together in the aftermath of Hannibal's seeming attack by Tobias Budge — how would their dynamic change if Hannibal were able to leverage Will's protective instincts toward him in that moment? How might that throw a wrench in Hannibal's self-protective scheming?—
- Complicated H/C where Hannibal's the one having to receive physical caretaking from Will — in a perverse kind of way post-Matthew Brown, after tangling with the Vergers, after Dolarhyde? — but the emotional parts are… messy.
- A different kind of fraught seduction into violence — sadist Will feeling complicated about his capacity for getting off on cruelty + (sado)masochist Hannibal enthusiastic about giving him someone to be baroquely nasty to? Or anything with the weird frisson of horny violence Will's fantasies manifest toward Hannibal becoming a reality.
- Sex pollen? Sex pollen. I'd especially love it if sex pollen is a rare but known naturally-occurring phenomenon (carried by Stamets' corpse mushrooms? Katherine Pimms' ghoulish honey?) — does Hannibal leverage it as a way of getting closer to Will, or vice-versa? Are they both blindsided? Will helping Hannibal through it with a little spite in the mix? Does the fallout force an earlier-than-canon acknowledgment of their not-very-platonic feelings for one another?
- I am a simple soul and I love reading about noncon/dubcon and other ways sexuality and trauma can dovetail. S2-era sex as part of Will's honeypot maneuver or Hannibal's attempted seduction into artmurder, with ulterior motives and reservations; Will and Hannibal getting together after previous questionably-consensual encounters between them and it making everything after that very fraught and difficult; noncon recovery for either of them, including noncon that occurred pre-canon.
Fandom-specific DNWs: calling Will "William"; fluffy post-s3 Hannigram (conflicted, fucked-up post-s3 Hannigram is great!); serial killer!Will AUs; explicitly stating that Will's never been attracted to men before Hannibal.
Fic dealing with the s3-finale cliff plunge as a murder-suicide, Will having issues around food related to all the cannibalism and ear-forcefeeding, or the various forms of incestuous/quasi-incestuous desire in canon (Abigail and all her adult authority figures, the Vergers, Hannibal and Mischa, Hannibal and his tragic but elegant aunt Lady Not-Appearing-In-This-Adaptation) are all fine — consider them requested!
Some associated smut tropes: Consent issues; undernegotiated kink, both fun and fraught; clothed and mostly-clothed sex; dissociation during sex; rope bondage; biting and bruising; impact play; hickeys/bruises/impact marks as a mutually desired sign of affection; Will being mouthy and verbally nasty; taste and scent; body hair; sexual jealousy; post-argument sex.
*
Pilgrimage (2017)
Damn, there's really a theme of rough-meets-smooth in these ships so far but it's arguable which one is which here -- two dudes from two very different homosocial environments and two very different cultures, with Raymond's exquisite violence and daddy issues making a great contrast to helpless, harmless Diarmuid who's never been outside the monastery before and may be an actual orphan/child oblate. I love nasty things happening to Diarmuid (and nice ones!) but I also am intrigued by the potential for a closer understanding between them, if not necessarily an affectionate one, and an exploration of the clash of cultures going on at this historical moment.
Brother Diarmuid/Raymond De Merville
- Raymond makes Diarmuid his concubine and takes him back to England (or France) by force.
- Conversely, Raymond makes Diarmuid his """"""personal chaplain"""" and takes him back to England (or France) by force. In either case I'd love to see Diarmuid thrust into civilian clothes for the first time in his life and dealing with the very different social mores of Anglo-Norman society.
- Something with the scene between the two of them in the woods going further in a rapey direction.
- Any kind of weird hostage situation where Raymond begins to feel grudging affection/protectiveness for Diarmuid and hates it. (Whether or not Diarmuid starts to feel a reciprocal obligation toward his captor, and especially if not.)
- Hurt-comfort with Raymond giving Diarmuid medical attention, or vice versa. (I love Diarmaid and Ciaran's interest in herbalism in canon, so feel free to draw that out.) With villain ships, I really enjoy the villain having a legit pang of conscience now and again, if not necessarily enough to turn Diarmuid loose.
Some associated smut tropes: Size kink; clothed/mostly-clothed sex; intercrural sex; handjobs; casual homosocial bed-sharing (or forbidden, taboo bed-sharing) as a prelude to sex; all kinds of medieval sodomy hangups; surprisingly rough sex; surprisingly gentle sex; kissing and embracing as plausible-deniability foreplay; language kink and verbal humiliation.
*
The X-Files
Okay, this ship is fully just my love of resentful little rat fucks and their terrible yet vaguely pathetic bosses manifesting itself once more. Krycek is a twisty murderous delight (I ship him with everyone) and the Cigarette-Smoking Man is an icon of faceless, almost colorless institutional malignancy; together they start out as a nice dyadic embodiment of all the conspiratorial badness our heroes are struggling against, a classic evil boss/evil henchman pair, but that dynamic evolves rapidly over a lot of backstabbing and, well, ratfucking, and ultimately they're both at the mercy of forces greater than themselves. I love the semi-dismal personal lives they both have as a result of the stuff they're ensnared in, and I would like them to bone down, or at least suffer. (My TXF tastes favor the pre-2016-reboot canon and that shows here in my prompts but I'm happy to read stuff that incorporates plot and characterization from comics canon/audio dramas/later seasons as long as it's not totally unintelligible without it.)
Cigarette-Smoking Man/Alex Krycek
- The Cigarette-Smoking Man catches feelings for Krycek; Krycek is simultaneously absolutely incensed about it given the givens (their respective roles in the whole Sinister Government Conspiracy thing, the CSM's general reprehensibility, the fact that he's a pitiful wannabe-novelist well past middle age who's married to his lousy job…) and borderline touched by it. Very faintly. Like, a tiny bit. Or vice-versa — Krycek experiences one (1) feeling for the C-Man other than resentment and loathing and copes with it about as well as you'd think.
- All kinds of creepy weird consent issues in either direction (or volleying in both directions) — their professional relationship is plenty contentious and I'd love to see how the shifting balances of power and animosity versus grudging obligation could inform them fucking and/or fucking with each other.
- The Syndicate Made Them Do It: more consent issues but on somebody else's terms.
- Came Back Wrong fic! Something with Krycek's black oil encounter/silo experience seems like a great fit for this, with him seemingly surviving the encounter but being a little less human than when he got infected with goo. You can take this in a serious, fucked-up direction or an absurd porny one... or both? Idk.
- Honestly anything you can do to whump Krycek and/or inconvenience the Cigarette-Smoking Man would make me very happy. Super-grudging hurt-comfort, having to become extremely temporary allies knowing they're going to be back to murdering each other tomorrow, going on the run together…
Some associated smut tropes: smoking and cigarette kink (naturally) incl. cigarette burns; hatesex; noncon and dubcon; "the fact that we keep having sex is clearly meaningless and in fact you're the weird one if you question it"; oral sex and oral fixations.
