the deep moans round with many voices

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Master List of Elizabeth Culmer's Fiction
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FANFICTION:

General Disclaimer: These stories are based on characters and situations created and owned by other people and corporations. I make no money from this borrowing of intellectual property, and intend no copyright or trademark infringement.

Organization: This list is organized primarily by fandom; within each fandom, it's arranged first by associated story cycles and then by writing date. Word counts and writing dates are approximations.

Content/Warning Policy: 1) I am not consistent about warnings! I use them when I remember, for a few relatively broad categories of potentially problematic content, but if something is off-page, non-explicit, or generally backgrounded, I probably won't think to note it in the metadata. Read at your own risk! 2) The things I try to warn for are explicit sex, rape, murder, torture, cannibalism, incest, depression/suicide, familial dysfunction, and occasionally also societal dysfunction (aka dystopia). Sometimes I just slap a general content warning on all my fic for a given fandom and don't label each individual fic. I also don't generally warn for violence, unless the violence in a fic is dramatically out-of-step with the violence in its source canon. 3) I don't use any content rating system unless I'm posting to a site or community that requires or encourages ratings, because I find movie-style ratings counter-intuitive when applied to written fiction, and not particularly useful for anything other than denoting the presence of explicit sex, which I already note in the metadata.

Quality Rating System: I've marked my favorite stories with asterisks, on a scale of 1 to 4. The more asterisks, the more I like the story. This doesn't necessarily mean that stories without asterisks are bad, just that I don't like them as much. Also, I am not claiming to be an arbiter of taste; you may love stories I dislike, and vice versa. I am just providing a heads-up about the ones that I think are best written and/or most interesting.

Where To Read: What I post on my journal tends to be the equivalent of a beta draft. If I have cross-posted a story literally anywhere else (except Tumblr; fic content there is just a mirror of fic content here), read the version that isn't on my journal. Versions on AO3 are definitive. If there is no AO3 version, read the ff.net version. If there is no ff.net version, read the FictionAlley version (only applicable for HP fic). Failing that, read the journal version, because that's the only one there is.

Harry Potter Fanfiction

Naruto Fanfiction

Angel Sanctuary Fanfiction

Chronicles of Narnia Fanfiction

Homestuck Fanfiction

MCU fanfic (assorted)

Minor Fandom Fanfiction
(currently includes BtVS/A:tS, The Dark Is Rising, the Darkangel trilogy, Enchanted Forest Chronicles, FF7: Mercverse AU, Inception, and Star Trek: AOS)

Miscellaneous Fanfiction
(Currently includes: American Gods, An Ash-Blonde Witch, Arthurian Mythology, Batman, the Bible, the Black Jewels series, the Bourne trilogy, Charlotte's Web, Code Geass, Death Note, Discworld, Doctor Who, Girl Genius, The Girl with the Silver Eyes, Glee, Gormenghast, Hamilton, Hexwood, The Homeward Bounders, Howl's Moving Castle, Labyrinth, Lord of the Rings, Lucifer (comics), Mad Max: Fury Road, Merlin, the Oz books, Ranma 1/2, Rise of the Guardians, Sailor Moon, Saiyuki, Seaward, Shakespeare, Star Wars, Tam Lin (Pamela Dean), Vorkosigan Saga, White Collar, Wolf Hall, X-Men, and Yu-Gi-Oh!)

Crossover Fanfiction
(I do not cross-list crossovers and fusions under their component fandoms; this is the only place to find them. Currently includes: the Anita Blake series, ASoIaF, Avatar: The Last Airbender, the Black Jewels series, BtVS, Cardcaptor Sakura, Chronicles of Narnia, the Darkangel trilogy, The Dark Is Rising, Discworld, Doctor Who, Enchanted Forest Chronicles, Ender's Game, Gundam Wing, Harry Potter, Hikaru no Go, Homestuck, Inception, the Indiana Jones movies, Leverage, Lucifer (comics), MCU (various), Merlin, Naruto, the Oz books, Sandman, Stargate: SG-1, Star Trek: AOS, Vorkosigan Saga, Welcome to Night Vale, and a couple other things that only appear in memes rather than actual fic.)

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ORIGINAL FICTION:

These stories are all mine! *grin* I use the same warning policy and quality rating system as for my fanfiction.

All Original Fiction

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My various bingo cards: Cotton Candy Bingo, Round One (blackout!); Cotton Candy Bingo, Round Two (blackout!); Genprompt Bingo, Round 12 (blackout!); Genprompt Bingo, Round 15; Ladies Bingo; Daredevil Bingo; Domestic AU Prompt List

I am trying to catch up on some internet housekeeping, so here is an absurdly belated Narnia Fic Exchange reveal post!

I wrote a story for Starbrow:

The Pleasures of the Flesh (1827 words) by Elizabeth Culmer
Fandom: Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis, Six of Crows Series - Leigh Bardugo
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Inej Ghafa & Susan Pevensie
Characters: Inej Ghafa, Susan Pevensie
Additional Tags: Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Golden Age (Narnia), Recovery, Pre-Relationship

Summary: The Wraith arrived in Port Paravel on the coattails of a late March storm, gliding into harbor as the dregs of the gale spent themselves on the palisaded shore and trickled away in skirls of fog and aggravation.

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I probably had relevant things to say about my writing process for this story back in September, but alas, I have forgotten most of them in the intervening months. Mostly I was pleased that I could finally fill a crossover prompt! Generally the crossovers people request for NFE are fandoms I either don't know at all, don't know well enough to write, or am not interested in writing (either at all, or just not in the requested context), which has been a minor sorrow of mine for some years. But! This time I had the relevant knowledge and interest (Inej, my beloved!), and I took gleeful advantage.

As always, I wanted the story to be longer but ran out of time, alas.

Batch the ninth. :)

All prompts drawn from the current iteration of the Three Sentence Ficathon (post one and post two), hosted by the wonderful rthstewart. The ficathon closes to new prompts tonight, but you can continue filling prompts and commenting on other people's fills for as long as you like!

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( 49. ) For paxilam: any, any, not answering the phone, written 2/23/21

Go to Voicemail (250 words)

Fandom = The Magnus Archives

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After his ordeal with Prentiss, Martin makes a point of answering his phone on the first ring and immediately replying to all texts; he winds up fielding a number of junk calls and disrupting his sleep schedule (insofar as he has a sleep schedule, here on the too-small cot in the document storage room, jolting awake at every creak of floorboard or groan of piping), but it's worth it to feel connected, to know that no supernatural creature will have another chance to impersonate him.

"That was one of the most suspicious things about you," Jon tells him much later; "It's not normal to be instantly available at all hours of the day and night, and naturally I jumped to incoherent conspiracy theories rather than the much more obvious and plausible answer that it was a trauma response -- the irony, of course, being that my paranoia was also a trauma response, and so we made each other steadily more upset rather than trying to support each other, or reach out to Tim."

"And when I stopped answering my phone altogether?" Martin asks. "Was that also suspicious?"

Jon shrugs, lightly, as if his isolation when he woke from his coma hardly mattered. "No, because by then I knew you -- I wished you would change your mind, of course, and I thought you were taking a terrible risk for a highly uncertain return, but you've let me run off halfcocked into all kinds of peril; how could I trust you any less?"

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( 50. ) For sawthefaeriequeen: Tam Lin by Pamela Dean, Janet and Tina, they develop their own roommate in-joke, written 2/24/21

It's All Greek to Me (710 words)

Obviously this is not a 3-sentence fill. *headdesk*

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( cut for length )

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( 51. ) For sholio: MCU, any, superpower swap, written 2/27/21

Mirror, Mirror (340 words)

This is more of a skill swap than a power swap, but I figure if building flying armor counts as a superpower, Natasha and Clint's skillsets should as well. :)

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The Red Room had a specific ideal to which they trained their agents -- deceptively lovely, flexible, able to wear any mask and get close enough to kiss a target and steal his secrets as well as his life -- but while Natasha excelled enough to live, that pattern always felt like somebody else's coat, too baggy in the shoulders and tight around the waist. She prefers to work from a distance and in the shadows; steal impersonal documents, snap photos, plant microphones; send an autographed bullet from half a mile away. The idea of touching other people's skin, feeling their breath against her ear, makes her own skin crawl like the memory of a dozen spiders wandering over her while she lay paralyzed and desperate not to scream, and it's a rare person who can pass unharmed through the sphere of empty space she carves around herself with her dead-eyed stare.

The US Army was much more interested in snipers than infiltrators, but sometimes what you want isn't what you need, and Clint's always been personable when he puts his mind to it, not to mention good with accents and languages and mirroring what other people project onto him; you pick up those tricks pretty quick as a runaway, and even more so in the entertainment business. He's still a sniper on paper, but the moment he catches wind of SHIELD sending out feelers, he makes a play for a different line of work -- something where he can look the people he kills in the eye and know that they have a faint chance of turning the tables, walking away while he bleeds out on the floor. It's probably just as unethical to betray a cultivated trust, but he's been doing that for most of his life and it's a rare person who can coax him to peel off his masks and show the awkward, half-forgotten shape of his true self.

They make an odd pair, the sniper and the seducer, but nobody at SHIELD would dare to pull them apart.

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( 52. ) For wingedflight: Narnia/The Magnus Archives, any, the entities in Narnia, written 2/28/21

A Century of Fear (295 words)

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1. Vast

Narnia is not a large land, but the shroud of Winter smothers the landscape, blurs landmarks into a sweeping sameness: a blank canvas of white-gray-black that deceives the eye and spreads out to, so far as anyone can know, the uttermost bounds of the world -- and perhaps even beyond, out past the Western mountains and the Eastern sea until a body could travel a thousand years and still never find a day of summer sun, for the Winter admits no truth but its own immutable nature, and flattens all attempts at defiance to mere blots on the purity of its expanse.

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2. Buried

Petrification should stop the mind along with the body, yet those who feel the tight embrace of stone close in around them, driving inward like a vice, could tell you otherwise if they still had breath and space to speak; instead they stand silent in the crushing prison of their own forms, squeezed tighter and tighter until it seems they must explode under the pressure of their own transformed skin and muscle and bone... and yet there is always another notch to tighten, and never the release of death or sleep.

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3. Corruption

Collaboration is the law of the land, a sick fever that floods communities like clockwork as neighbor sells out neighbor for a scrap of food or a brief reprieve from violence; to love your family, to do right by them, you must do wrong by others, and that truth gnaws both inward through the soul and outward through the fragile bonds of care and trust that bind downtrodden Narnians together, until no one can look upon those they love, those for whom they sold their self-respect, without a hot rush of shame and revulsion clogging their throats and coating their teeth with bile.

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( 53. ) For anonymous: Any, any, starry river of the sky, written 2/28/21

Who Walks Among the Stars (160 words)

Fandom = original

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The stars are more of a sea than a river, and more of a marsh than either, but there are channels where light flows swift and deep in and among the darker, drier ground, and those are what travelers follow on the winding paths between the worlds -- unless, of course, they are lucky enough to win the favor of birds and fly swift and true where others walk.

Kemmess steps tentatively from one hillock of dark to the next, testing the depth of the starry stream with the green, sap-sticky length of a broken reed, still glowing faintly with watery light. She has traversed the earth, the moon, and the sun without finding the hidden keep where her beloved has either fled or been imprisoned -- each witness she meets tells a different tale -- but there are whispers of worlds more distant yet in the heavens, and she will walk a thousand years rather than turn back with questions yet unanswered.

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( 54. ) For anonymous: Any, any, silk, sage, silver, written 2/28/21

Sacrifices (150 words)

Fandom = original

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Silk: she ties a sash across your eyes, ties your wrists behind your back, ties your ankles as you kneel, ties your tongue with careful stitches to stopper up your sighs; there is no need to silence screams, not when you have come willing to her bed, but the ritual is stern.

Sage: she wafts incense through the air, traces oil across your skin in swirls and angled strokes in the pattern of a language and a script you never learned but now almost understand through touch alone.

Silver: she slides the needle into the softness beneath your skin, sends a rush of snow-melt cold flooding through your veins, a tracery of silver from your fingers to your heart... and when the cold-shock hits, when your pulse skips and stutters, she calls you treasure, calls you sister, calls you goddess, and whispers her eternal thanks as she sheaths her knife.

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I am experiencing a small amount of self-directed annoyance at not completing the same number of fills as last year (when I wrote 72, 12x6 being a tidy and auspicious number), but then I console myself with the knowledge that my life has been significantly more disrupted this year than last year (surgery! church crisis!) and also I am busier at the rental company in my new job than I was in my old job. And 54 fills is not a shabby number by any stretch of the imagination.

Also I have entire pages of the second ficathon post I have not yet perused, so I think I will give myself permission to continue writing fills for at least another week. :)

And now, bed, because my wrist is very sore and I would like to get some sleep.

Batch the sixth. :)

All prompts drawn from the current iteration of the Three Sentence Ficathon (post one and post two), hosted by the wonderful rthstewart. Come join the fun!

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( 31. ) For anonymous: Any, any, grieving for the living, written 2/12/21

Last Rites (95 words)

Fandom = The Magnus Archives. SPOILERS FOR EPISODE 194!

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( cut for spoilers )

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( 32. ) For undeadrobins: Any, any, waking up to the alarm, written 2/13/21

Home Front (885 words)

Fandom = The Magnus Archives. This turned into a season 5-style statement fic. It's mostly a Slaughter domain, though there are some elements of the Eye, the Desolation, the Vast, and the Lonely floating around the edges.

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( cut for length )

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( 33. ) For thetransintransgenic: Oz/any set on Earth, any, queer visitors from Oz, written 2/13/21

Rainbow's End (175 words)

I realized after I posted this that thetransintransgenic probably meant queer in the modern sense while I was thinking of queer = odd due to the time period when Oz was written. Also, this is not a crossover. *headdesk*

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"And this is my friend Polychrome, she's the Rainbow's Daughter and helped me come visit you even though Philadelphia isn't a fairy country," Saladin said, swinging his left hand forward, his fingers (still a bit pudgy with youth, as if he hadn't aged a day since he vanished) twined with the slender, almost ethereal digits of a strangely ageless girl in multicolored scraps of a fabric that wasn't quite gauze, wasn't quite silk, and looked as if it would cost a hundred dollars an inch for an untattered bolt.

Richard glanced at Eleanor, whose speaking look conveyed quite clearly, 'Your ancestor owned a magic umbrella, mine once killed a dragon, and our son reappeared on the roof after a storm; who's to say he hasn't befriended a fairy?' -- and that was an excellent point, so Richard turned back to Saladin and said, "A pleasure to meet you, Miss Polychrome; any friend of our Button-Bright is always welcome in our home."

"As you are welcome in mine," Polychrome said, and curtsied fit to greet a queen.

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( 34. ) For thetransintransgenic: Oz/any set on Earth, any, queer visitors from Oz, written 2/13/21

Natural History (250 words)

So I wrote a second fill. Crossover = Oz/Chronicles of Narnia. The Field Museum really does have two separate exhibits of human-eating lions (though one is from 1990, and therefore beyond the scope of this ficlet).

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"Dorothy Gale," says the blonde girl with the light of other worlds in her eyes, as she shakes Susan's hand, her left arm tucked firmly around her black-haired companion's waist; "I was born in Kansas, oh, ages ago, but there's not much to see there besides farms and sky so I thought I'd bring Ozma to Chicago and show her a real modern city, and so far it's been awfully good fun, especially the trains and the skyscrapers -- how about you?"

"My father is here for work, and he and my mother thought it would be educational for me to see some of the world beyond England," Susan says; "While I can't say I'm terribly fond of railways, I do agree that skyscrapers are fascinating -- and speaking of fascinating things, I was planning to visit the Field Museum, which I'm told has many intriguing exhibits, including the stuffed remains of two man-eating lions; may I invite you to accompany me?"

Dorothy glances at Ozma who smiles and says, "We must never tell the Cowardly Lion about his cousins' taste or their fates," (Susan, who has her own history with lions, tucks this away to decipher later) which seems to signal agreement since Dorothy plants an enthusiastic kiss on the other girl's cheek before turning back to Susan and chirping their agreement.

Susan never does unearth their story, but that's all right; she's learned to respect other people's privacy, and it would be a shame to spoil such a lovely day.

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( 35. ) For anonymous: Oz books (L. Frank Baum), Ozma, poppies, written 2/14/21

If I Should Change Before I Wake (445 words)

A nine-sentence fill, because reasons.

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Ozma only learned about the poppy field by accident, overhearing the Scarecrow and Nick Chopper reminisce about their journey with Dorothy and wonder idly if the flowers are still there; that struck her as a question worth answering, but not important enough to assemble a Royal Progress, so she rode out to look at the poppy field accompanied only by the Sawhorse which, of course, could not be affected by their sleep-inducing scent.

Death was rare in Oz, so rare as to be nearly impossible, and the poppies' lure of repose was nigh overpowering, yet as Ozma and the Sawhorse wandered through the brilliant expanse of red blossoms, they found no slumbering bodies under the swaying stems and leaves -- either the poppies' victims had sunk into the earth entire, or someone with magical protection (or no need to breathe) had been collecting them.

"Which do you suppose is more likely, old friend?" Ozma asked the Sawhorse, one hand resting lightly on her Magic Belt.

"I have no knowledge on which to base a guess," the Sawhorse said, pawing idly at the base of a poppy stalk with one wooden leg, "but I can stay and keep watch; sooner or later someone will fall asleep and then we'll know what happens."

Ozma considered this, then nodded: "It's my royal duty to remove my enchantments and let the poppies' power affect me," she said; "I cannot let any of my subjects risk this danger unaware, and if we return to the Emerald City to ask for a volunteer, who knows what might occur while we are gone?"

"Royal duty sounds terribly unpleasant," the Sawhorse said, but it agreed to Ozma's plan so long as she used her Magic Belt to send a message to the Scarecrow before she fell asleep.

As she removed her enchantments and lay on the soft ground between and beneath the swaying poppies, Ozma wondered how long their perfume would need to take effect, not to mention how long before whatever fate befell the other sleepers would claim her in its turn.

The poppies' scent was heavy and warm, rich without cloying, and Ozma stared upward at the red petals bobbing, the green leaves fluttering, the blue sky and white clouds beyond, all melding into a strangely familiar swirl of color and scent and that echoed behind her slowly closing eyes.

As her mind unmoored from the tethers of the waking world, she realized this swooning, dizzy whirl felt almost exactly like Mombi's spell that had changed her from Tip to Ozma, and had one moment to wonder what body she would wake in before she drifted into the unmapped sea of sleep.

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( 36. ) For rthstewart: Doctor Who, Donna Noble, That's where all the weird stuff's happening. In the paperwork., written 2/14/21

Worthy of Her Hire (195 words)

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Not that it's any of Donna's business, or that she's been looking in particular, but if you want to know how the marketing director spends his holiday bonus (very posh tastes, that man, in the best fucking-the-pig tradition) or where the hired lorries took the old office furniture after the big switcharound (not, shall we say, any of the usual places one takes old furniture, and she might do a spot of digging to satisfy her own curiosity on that point), she can tell you; she can tell you everything.

She files all the paperwork, after all, and scans and files the digital versions, too -- it takes a bit to learn what's normal, what's normal-weird, and what's proper weird for any company, but she has practice; she can pick that up in two weeks or less -- and it's beyond her why nobody ever expects a temp to read the papers she handles.

And if she should happen to spot something not just proper weird but dangerous... well, Donna may be a little fuzzy on the past few years of her life, but she remembers just enough to know, bone-deep, that she can make things better.

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I have such a lot of fun with this ficathon every year. :DDD

Hey, the_rck: It took me over a year, but I triumphed! \o/

The Three Sisters of Tumbledown Creek (13761 words) by Elizabeth Culmer
Fandom: Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis, Naruto
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Relationships: Shizune & Tsunade (Naruto), Original Character & Original Character
Characters: Antoinette Bristleback (OFC), Madeleine Bristleback (OFC), Therese Bristleback (OFC), Tsunade (Naruto), Shizune (Naruto), Lieutenant Brynnhild (OFC), Private Gretel (OFC), Florence Greybriar (OFC)
Additional Tags: Prompt Fic, Crossover, Pre-The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, Pre-Canon, Age of Winter (Narnia), Dimension Travel, Ethical Dilemmas, Family, Resistance, Police Brutality, Secret Police (Narnia), Talking Animals, Violence, Ninja, Pigs, Wolves, POV Female Character, Bittersweet Ending, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Moral Ambiguity, Blood and Injury

Summary: In the days when Jadis the White Witch conquered Narnia and trapped the land in an enchanted winter, there were three Talking Pigs, all sisters, who lived in a little brick house beside a creek that flowed through the woods into the Glasswater.

One day, they had some unexpected guests.