Dira Sudis

Vorkosigan Fic: Dance Across the Room

2013-03-17T22:03:14Z

Soooo I first started this one--intending that it should have a bit of a plot woven into the porn--sometime around December. Of 2010. It's been a bit of a thorn in my paw as I've gone forward with the series (and I've abandoned it at least twice only to pick it back up). So now it's done! And a PWP!

This is, more or less, the eighth story in the internal chronology of The World That You Need, though the (ye gods) tenth posted.

Many thanks to ellen_fremedon for beta, and to iulia, oliviacirce and rubynye and the other usual suspects for encouragement!

Aral/Jole, (Aral/Cordelia). Explicit. Sex toys. 5500 words.
"I've never really seen the point. I mean, sex is already fun. It's sex. I don't know what you'd need toys for."

Read below or at the AO3.

( Dance Across the Room )

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More podfic of The World That You Need!

2012-11-26T23:30:41Z

Izzady has posted podfic of the third story in my Aral/Jole series: When the Reckoning Arrives!

I have to admit it's startling to hear all the French words pronounced correctly, because that is not how they sound in my (sadly monolingual) head.

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The Podfic That You Need

2012-10-30T02:17:24Z

...or, you know, at least you might want it? Anyway!

izzady has embarked on a podficcing project, valiantly taking on The World That You Need, my Aral/Cordelia & Aral/Jole series!

Podfics for the first two stories are up now!

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Vorkosigan Fic: The Emperor's Voice

2012-10-29T23:15:49Z

For the Lost Voice square on my cottoncandy_bingo card, because, obviously.

Gregor/Laisa, little princes. G. 1,370 words.
Given the nature of the complaint, Laisa stayed at Gregor's side when his personal physician arrived to examine him.

( The Emperor's Voice )

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Vorkosigan Fic: Rocks in the Pathway (Aral/Cordelia, Aral/Jole)

2012-09-17T23:05:36Z

Going on two years ago, when I posted Everything That You Can Keep, JanLevine pointed out in a comment that there ought to be a story in this series about Aral getting pulled out of bed for Miles's Kyril Island incident; without that nudge, I wouldn't have come up with this story.

Of course, the story I came up with two years ago and planned on writing for the better part of the last two years was, as it turned out, wrong in certain significant aspects, so many thanks to commodorified for pointing that out to me when I complained about how hard it was proving to write.

Thanks also to sanj, petra, and fairestcat for encouragement along the way, and as ever, thanks most of all, for beta and general support, to iulia.

So here is the ninth story in The World That You Need, with, for those keeping score, a title from the Mountain Goats' "Heretic Pride" that made slightly more sense for the earlier version of the plot and then just stuck.

During The Vor Game. Aral/Cordelia, Aral/Jole. Not explicit. 5800 words.
Arkady was awakened before dawn by a knock on the door.

( Rocks in the Pathway )

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Things I have been reading

2012-07-26T00:58:30Z

I have been reading things!

Two of them I read on my phone before getting out of bed this morning, because I like to start my day off right:

Lullaby (1186 words) by Philomytha
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Vorkosigan Saga - Lois McMaster Bujold
Rating: General Audiences
Warning: Author Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Characters: Ludmilla "Drou" Droushnakovi, Kareen Vorbarra, Gregor Vorbarra, Steggie the stegosaurus, Serg Vorbarra
Summary:

Steggie is having trouble sleeping.

This is my brand new instant head-canon for Drou, and a painfully gorgeous look at her and Gregor and Kareen in the last days of Serg's presence in their lives. And I got about halfway through it before I was thinking, "Awww, I want to write Vorkosigans."

A New Dance (859 words) by Philomytha
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Vorkosigan Saga - Lois McMaster Bujold
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Aral Vorkosigan/Alys Vorpatril
Characters: Aral Vorkosigan, Alys Vorpatril
Summary:

The first time Aral and Alys kiss. A Reconstruction 'verse fic.

This one will not make sense if you haven't read Reconstruction first and, note pairing, it's a 'verse where Cordelia died in the rescue mission to get Miles during the Pretendership. It left me thinking "Aww, I want to write Vorksoigans in hideously dire circumstances." But that is probably a rabbit hole I should not venture down, with the wolves breathing down my neck.

Today I also finished reading a book to fulfill my self-assigned quota of Books That Are Not SF or Fantasy and Are Popular Among My Library's Readers And/Or Books Clubs at My Local Bookstore, which I more pithily describe as "Oughta" books in my booklist. (Previous books read for this category include Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Art of Racing in the Rain, and Room, all of which I have quite liked.)

This past week I read Paula MacLain's The Paris Wife, which I found fascinating but don't quite know how to talk about, which is a peril of reading and being fascinated by books about how the other half lives.

The book is about Ernest Hemingway's first wife, Hadley Richardson, and as the title suggests it follows the arc of their marriage, much of which was spent in Paris. But what it's really about is a non-writer in love with a writer, following him into a circle of friends who are all writers or artists or critics or otherwise creative people (and ultimately losing him to one of them). It's a beautiful book, and it's impossible not to feel for Hadley, but I kept having this disconnect whenever I tried to put myself in her shoes as she felt increasingly isolated and marginalized--because in the same circumstances I know I would have my own work to turn to. It's a weird kind of, idk, certainty privilege, and I don't know that I've ever read anything else that pointed it up so sharply.

On a much shallower note, more or less my entire knowledge of the creative expat scene in Paris in the Twenties comes from watching Midnight in Paris, so I spent this whole book picturing Kathy Bates as Gertrude Stein and Tom Hiddleston as Scott Fitzgerald and Corey Stoll as Hemingway, which did not at all detract from my enjoyment. *g*

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Captain Vorpatril's Alliance

2012-06-27T12:30:20Z

I read it! And now there are spoilers of a generally superficial nature.

( Spoilers under the cut. )

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Answers to the list-of-characters meme!

2012-04-26T16:36:48Z

So, I have to confess, when I first started getting questions on the meme and comparing them to the list of characters I made before posting, I quickly realized that I had broken the meme. I mean, okay, in rapid succession Arya Stark woke up married to James Hathaway and then Teal'c. And Aral Vorkosigan had a past romantic relationship with Georgia Mason. It just ... no.

So I made a new list, had random.org generate a random order for me, and went again. With much less horrifying results, although there was still one totally unanswerable question.

Here's my (second) list of fifteen characters:

1. Aral Vorkosigan
2. Nate Fick (GK overview with character summaries | Picture of Nate)
3. Sam Carter
4. Konstantin Bothari
5. Tim "Doc" Bryan (GK overview with character summaries | Picture of Doc)
6. Daniel Jackson
7. Alys Vorpatril
8. Vala Mal Doran
9. Cameron Mitchell
10. Ray Person (GK overview with character summaries | Picture of Ray)
11. Teal'c
12. Gregor Vorbarra
13. Simon Illyan
14. Brad Colbert (GK overview with character summaries | Picture of Brad)
15. Walt Hasser (GK overview with character summaries | Picture of Walt)

And here are the questions!

( All twenty-nine of them under the cut, including what happens when Gregor Vorbarra joins a band of space pirates, ways things could turn out better for Bothari, and which of these fifteen murders which other one. Plus assorted people waking up married and the one question I couldn't answer at all. )

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Vorkosigan fic: Fishing in the Morning (Aral/Cordelia)

2012-04-19T01:21:50Z

misspamela asked for some Aral/Cordelia fic, so here is a bit of goofy early-morning domesticity.

Aral/Cordelia. G rated. 600 words.
"You're really not awake at all, are you, love?"

( Fishing in the Morning )

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Generation Kill/Vorkosigan Saga fic: Tactical Shit

2012-04-01T22:06:42Z

So a while back the challenge at fan_flashworks was Anywhere But Here, and I let that rattle around in my head, and it immediately came back with my strongest fic-association with that phrase: AJ Hall's Time Shall Not Mend, a Vorkosigan/Harry Potter crossover which begins with Ekaterin thinking that phrase--Anywhere but here--before magic obediently whisks her away into the war against Voldemort.

So naturally I found myself plotting out the story about Brad Colbert wishing so passionately for one real recon mission that he finds himself whisked out of Iraq and into the Dendarii Mountains, coming face to face with twenty-something General Piotr Vorkosigan and his resistance.

Then I got distracted by something shiny, and didn't write it until yesterday, during the fan_flashworks Amnesty challenge. So here it is:

Generation Kill/Vorkosigan Saga. Gen.
Brad Colbert, Piotr Vorkosigan.
PG-13. 2500 words.

Tactical Shit

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Two things

2012-03-16T05:17:39Z

1) I reblogged this gifset of Jean Dujardin being hot and then immediately tried to fantasy-cast him as somebody from the Vorkosigan Saga (because it's my only fandom where everybody isn't, you know, already cast as someone).

So, uh, now in my head Jean Dujardin = Dono Vorrutyer.

(I think Donna's nose would have been a bit different. But Dono, yes.)

2) I am trying to read more non-genre popular books, for lo, I work in a public library and people think I know about popular non-genre fiction. So today I started reading Garth Stein's The Art of Racing in the Rain--it came up a lot when readers told us the last three books they'd read so we could recommend books for them--and eighty pages in I have three thoughts about it.

a) Iulia is never allowed to read this book, especially the first chapter. (The whole story is in the dog's POV, in flashback from the end of his life. Which means his life is ending.)

b) Internets, why is there not fic where Enzo gets fast-tracked for reincarnation and winds up as an adult human fast enough for Denny to fall in love with him? And maybe Enzo could work on Denny's pit crew? Or he could be Zoe's stay-at-home stepdad, I am not picky, there just needs to be fic. I MEAN UNLESS THAT'S HOW THE BOOK ENDS, THEN I GUESS FIC WOULD BE UNNECESSARY?

There is no fic for this book on the AO3, so I am forced to assume that that's because the book itself takes care of everyone's Denny/human!Enzo needs. Yes. I am assured of this.

And if all else fails there's always Yuletide.

c) This better not be like that time I read a whole bunch of Jared/Jensen fic where they're in the rodeo and for a while I cared passionately about bullriders. To say nothing of the time I read the Kirk/Spock AU and for a while I almost started watching golf. I BETTER NOT END UP WATCHING AUTO RACING WHEN I FINISH THIS BOOK. Unless it's for fic research. That probably doesn't count. Right?

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Vorkosigan polyamory fic: Keeping Care of Me, Keeping Watch

2012-02-14T14:14:17Z

As you will no doubt have noticed, I have made the bold decision to add a third song to my titling scheme for this series: this one is from The Mountain Goats' Genesis 30:3, which is very them on multiple levels.

Many thanks to iulia and fairestcat for their help with this!

This story is, judging from the internal evidence, set before the epilogue to "Everything That You Can Keep", but "Sings in Your Heart" is probably set after. Uh. Feel free to work out the timeline as it best pleases you, I have obviously lost track. I promise the next one will be firmly grounded at a specific point in time!

Aral/Cordelia, Aral/Jole. Not explicit. 4600 words.
For once, the middle-of-the-night crisis did not have the very worst possible timing.

( Keeping Care of Me, Keeping Watch )

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dira @ 2012-02-09T21:43:00

2012-02-10T04:07:52Z

gryphons_lair, Diane Echelbarger, died peacefully today in hospice. *

We were never very close, but I've known her since I was fifteen--basically half my life, at this point--and I first met her in person when I was seventeen, the first time I went to an SF convention. That was my first time meeting people from online fandom--the Lois McMaster Bujold Mailing List--in person. A bunch of us were there because Lois was guest of honor. I went to all of Lois's programming, and sat dumbstruck in her presence chewing on a coffee stir in a small-group chat session. But there was no such silence with the Listies I met that weekend; I co-hosted the big Listie room party. They were My People, and had been for years already, through most of my high school years.

Diane and I were never very close, but she was part of my fandom-family in a way that's sort of hard to explain if you weren't on the List between 1996 and 2002, maybe impossible to explain if you're not in fandom. She was one of the people who kindly and gently and infinitely bookishly brought me up from the awkward and undersocialized fifteen-year-old I was when I joined the List to, well, at least an early version of the me I am today. I owe a very great debt. I will miss her.

I will say, because you are the people to whom I need not preface this with an apology for being silly or irrelevant: fairestcat called to give me the not-altogether-unexpected news, and I assured her that I was all right, and I was very calm for ten or fifteen minutes, and then it occurred to me that I didn't know if Diane had gotten to read the forthcoming Ivan book, and that was when I started to cry. (She did get to, as it happens. I want to be comforted by that but I just wind up thinking about everything else she did miss, will miss, will have missed.)

* Fuck cancer. Fuck it.

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WIP meme!

2012-01-30T14:45:44Z

(Dreamwidth only: Random icon is random and also a reminder from the universe that I need to get started on my Lupercalia story. Speaking of WIPs.)

WIP Meme! Because, let's face it, I am constitutionally incapable of letting this one go by without participating.

From misspamela: Post a random sentence (or three whole paragraphs) from every WIP you're currently working on, even if it's very short. Then invite people to ask questions about your WIP. With any luck, you'll get talking about writing, and the motivation to take that WIP one step closer to completion will appear as if by magic!

Naturally I am going for the "three whole paragraphs" option. Feel free to ask questions! Even if they are more of a comment than a question.

( Lewis kidfic! )

( The unfunny Aral/Jole story. )

( The GK story that did not appear in yesterday's poll, for reasons. )

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<3 <3 <3 <3 <3

2012-01-29T13:57:50Z

minutia_r has at long last filled the void that surely existed in all our hearts ever since reading that reference, waiting for someone to actually write Aral drunkenly declaiming revolution. In iambic pentameter.

Aral! Declaiming revolution! IN THE FORM OF A SONNET.

Declaiming Revolution

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Vorkosigan fic: Asked and Answered

2012-01-23T22:07:35Z

For philomytha, who asked for Aral/Simon. This is a somewhat sideways approach.

Memory. Aral/Simon. Not explicit. 550 words.
It was just the same as always.

( Asked and Answered )

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Vorkosigan Canadian Shack fic: Til Death Do Us Part

2012-01-19T13:33:58Z

Because canon het pairings and Canadian (well, probably South Barrayaran) shacks go together like... maple mead and bug butter.

Til Death Do Us Part (500 words) by Dira Sudis
Fandom: Vorkosigan Saga - Lois McMaster Bujold
Rating: General Audiences
Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Gregor Vorbarra/Laisa Toscane Vorbarra
Characters: Laisa Toscane Vorbarra, Gregor Vorbarra
Summary:

"Where are the Armsmen going to sleep?"

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Vorkosigan fic: Timely

2012-01-17T13:24:24Z

Do you know, I think this is the first time I've ever written OMC/OMC?

ellen_fremedon requested Hector and Alyosha, so here they are. Falls into the continuity of The World That You Need, but I suppose if you want to read OMC/OMC fic set about halfway through Shards of Honor you don't need any further explanation for this.

During Shards of Honor, Hector/Alyosha. Not explicit. 500 words.
Whatever this is, it's so dire that Aleksi is approaching him openly.

( Timely )

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Vorkosigan Canadian Shack fic: Honeymoon Itinerary Item #47

2012-01-08T05:53:55Z

Canadian shacks! This is a thing we're doing again now!

(This exercise in brevity not at all brought to you by this fine bottle of sadly not Canadian beer. At all.)

Honeymoon Itinerary Item #47 (500 words) by Dira Sudis
Fandom: Vorkosigan Saga - Lois McMaster Bujold
Rating: General Audiences
Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Ekaterin Vorsoisson Vorkosigan/Miles Vorkosigan
Characters: Ekaterin Vorsoisson Vorkosigan, Miles Naismith Vorkosigan
Summary:

Everything had been lovely so far.

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New fandom & fannish year in review.

2011-12-28T16:41:51Z

Sooooo on the 20th lamardeuse recced a lovely Lewis story called "The Hermit Crab" and, having read one or two of her squee posts about Lewis I read it. And then downloaded the first two episodes. And then drove to my parents' house, which meant A LOT OF HOURS IN THE CAR TO THINK, and then spent some time carving out alone-time at my parents' house by watching more Lewis and then MORE HOURS IN THE CAR and the upshot is: yeah, I'm probably going to write Lewis/Hathaway kidfic. It's all plotted out! It's very nearly totally finite in scope! I've mostly already done all the research I need to on UK paternity law thanks to watching Single Father last year!

Also Hathaway may actually have been invented just to make me happy, idk. He's a seminarian-turned-cop who responds to his manpain by despondently playing guitar alone in his flat. His crush on Lewis is visible from space as impeccably color-coordinated sparkles in the vicinity of Oxford. (OHAI OXFORD I MISS YOU.) This is the only adorable clip of them I can find on YouTube, but it is extremely adorable.

So, now that that's out of the way: here is a fandom-year-in-review meme that I swiped from... somebody.

Your main fandom of the year?
Stargate SG-1 dominated the first half of the year, overlapping slightly with Generation Kill which took over from then on. And the Vorkosigan Saga has been thrumming away patiently throughout.

Your favorite film you watched this year?
Captain America, I think, although I guess fannishly speaking X-Men: First Class wins out on actually having compelled me to write fic.

Also I feel I should make special mention of having finally for the first time, after about eleven years of active resistance, watched The Big Lebowski, which was pretty great and not at all the embarrassment-squick-farce-thing I was flinchingly anticipating. iulia was, as usual, right.

Your favorite book read this year?
A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter M. Miller, and One Bullet Away, by Nathaniel Fick--weirdly pretty much equal amounts of physically hugging the book because I adored it so much for each of those. And Mira Grant's Deadline!!! And The Last Werewolf, Glen Duncan's unfortunate personality notwithstanding. And all of Fables. And The Princess Curse and The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making and The Persian Boy and Born to Run and and and.

Your favorite tv show of the year?
Castle is the only full-network-season show I've kept up with all year, and I continue to enjoy its goofy, good-natured approach to cop drama. Critically speaking, Game of Thrones and Southland were both brilliant (and heart-wrenching), and I eagerly anticipate the next seasons of each.

Your best new fandom discovery of the year?
Generation Kill, which in my experience encompasses the chocolate-in-my-peanut-butter breakthrough of adding A Companion to Wolves to anything, but especially GK. Also, as of this week, Lewis. ♥

Your biggest fandom disappointment of the year?
White Collar, where the show actually objectively seems to have changed, and Doctor Who, in which my view of the show changed.

Your fiction boyfriend of the year?
Brad Colbert.

Your fiction girlfriend of the year?
Sam Carter. (Now I really want Sam and Brad to hang out and blow shit up together. ♥)

Your biggest squee moment of the year?
I am pretty terrible at remembering these, but the one that leaps to mind is this moment in maybe the third episode of Lewis, when it has become moderately plot-relevant for Hathaway to reveal to Lewis that he plays in a group that does "world music plus jazz and medieval madrigals", and Hathaway says off-handedly that he will get Lewis some of the music to listen to. Lewis seems about as enthusiastic about this prospect as any sane person confronted with that description.

At the end of the episode, Hathaway pulls out an iPod and offers one earbud to Lewis, telling him it's that music he does, and Lewis gamely pops in the earbud while Hathaway pops in the other and they walk down the street in perfect sync, listening together. ♥__________♥

Your biggest fan anticipations for the coming year?
CAPTAIN VORPATRIL'S ALLIANCE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
And I guess the actual Avengers movie is going to come out this summer so we can write movie-verse fic based on Steve and Tony actually interacting in movie canon? That's going to be neat.
But mostly, IVAN! HIS BOOK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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Vorkosigan polyamory fic: Sings in Your Heart

2011-11-29T12:54:27Z

So last December I strayed away from working on my Aral/Cordelia & Aral/Jole series to just quickly write a couple of other (totally short and easy, ha ha) Vorkosigan stories. I posted the second of those stories two weeks ago. This isn't the next story I'd had outlined for the Aral/Jole series, just sort of a fluffy flashfic warmup for getting back to the characters.

Title (once again) from this random live cover of "Two-Headed Boy" by the Mountain Goats in which John Darnielle gets a lot of the words wrong.

Thanks to iulia for giving this one the green light.

Aral/Jole, Aral/Cordelia. Not explicit. Fluff. 3,000 words.
Part of The World That You Need. The Prime Minister doodles during meetings.

( Sings in Your Heart )

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Vorkosigan Fic: Frequently Suggested Sexual Practices: An Aid to Communication

2011-11-15T23:59:50Z

Let's never, ever discuss how long this story has been in progress. Let's just say 2011 is my year of finishing things and leave it at that.

Many, many enormous thanks to ellen_fremedon, petra, fairestcat, and iuliamentis for beta, as well as everyone else who read or otherwise encouraged this in the last ... unspecified span of time.

Set during Shards of Honor. Aral/Cordelia. Explicit. Pegging. 8000 words.
Despite the title/rating/etc., this is a story about all the sex Aral and Cordelia didn't have with each other before they got married.

( Frequently Suggested Sexual Practices: An Aid to Communication )

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WIP Meme: working titles and first lines

2011-10-14T22:47:58Z

Swiped from rubynye: Here's [a meme] where I'll post the working title of a story, and the first sentence, for my most current WIPs. No pairing or summary info.

Right now I have reasonably final titles for everything, but I'll use the handles I use when talking to other people about the stories, in their least summary/pairing-revealing versions.

Also, I only have three WIPs with first lines in place right now, and one of those is a biiiig reach in terms of actually being in progress. o.O

( WIPs! )

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Vorkosigan Fic: Family in a Box (Some Assembly Required)

2011-10-04T12:21:35Z

This story was fox's idea, even though she still can't read it due to spoilers, and technically had no idea what she was suggesting to me when she demanded this story.

Many thanks to iulia and ellen_fremedon for their help!

Nikki and Gregor. Gen. 2700 words.
The third time Nikki met the Emperor was also the first time he met his soon-to-be-stepfather's foster brother.

( Family in a Box (Some Assembly Required) )

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Vorkosigan/Doctor Who Fic: And All Its Clear Relations

2011-09-14T01:22:45Z

Soooo after a mere thirteen months (I just noticed it took me a year to write the last crossover, too--clearly this is a difficult thing for me), here it is! Story title is from T. S. Eliot's "Rhapsody on a Windy Night" (Dissolve the floors of memory. / And all its clear relations. / Its divisions and precisions... )

Many, many thanks to iulia for sticking with me and this story for the last year, and to her and ellen_fremedon for excellent beta!

This is a sequel to my Jack Harkness/Aral Vorkosigan story, Signals That Sound in the Dark, but unlike that story it is totally, entirely gen. You probably don't need to have read Signals to read this as long as you accept the premise that Aral once met Jack Harkness and felt that he owed Jack a favor by the end of the night.

This story is set halfway between Barrayar and The Warrior's Apprentice for Aral and Cordelia, and circa "Vincent and the Doctor" for the Doctor and Amy. It would have been much more topical if I had written it about twelve and a half months faster. *g*

Gen. Aral Vorkosigan, Cordelia Naismith Vorkosigan, Eleventh Doctor, Amy Pond. 21,000 words.
In which the Doctor takes Amy on a holiday to Barrayar and hardly anything goes wrong at all.

( And All Its Clear Relations )

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