Chocolate Box Letter

[karanguni]

Dear Chocolatier!

I am unfortunately quite braindead after Yuletide, but rest assured that I am excited for anything you wish to dream up! My prompts are entirely just suggestions - go for whatever floats your boat. The more bizarre the better! I've sort of put myself in the bizarre boat.

General Likes

* Old friendships and ex-relationships: people who were close but who then drifted or were driven apart, and how they come together again. The internal struggle of renegotiating new/old territory; unrequited/unresolved tension. I really like pining that aches, and I don't mind not having a happy (or any) resolution.
* People who know each other very well, and who translate that knowledge into a variety of things - whether that's intimacy, sex, codependency, codeswitching or otherwise - that aren't easily read or understood by third parties. Ingroup/outgroup dynamics!
* Service/loyalty/betrayal/contractual obligations.
* Perserverance under pressure and the need for pressure to thrive.
* People wielding technical proficiencies - learned or trained - like a knife
* Personal versus public battles, and how a character balances the two. Winning one only to lose the other; difficult compromises.
* Cross-class interactions; the bigger the divide, the better. Double points if it's not just a case of "I've got X and you've not", but rather how two people challenge each other across said divides.
* Worldbuilding, especially economic and political worldbuilding

Did someone say porn?

* Powerplays and mindfucking, whether in bed or out of it. Cavalier but not careless use of personal power, or personal .
* Dom/sub dynamics, but not as a lifestyle (This one's weird - so.... A commander/subordinate relationship with lots of sir-ing? Delicious. Bringing a BDSM master/slave relationship out of the bedroom without a supporting non-bedroom context? Nah. :))
* Age gaps, and gaps in general - of experience, of personal wealth, of language, of social class
* Breathplay, button-pushing (like, say, putting someone with a fear of chairs in a chair...), voyeurism, uniform-kink, being mostly dressed...

DNWs

I am a generally omnivorous reader. If you want to let your kink or darkfic flag fly, I've got no squicks and am always happy to try something once.

---

The Culture

GOU Falling Outside the Normal Moral Constraints/Cheradenine Zakalwe Cheradenine Zakalwe/Diziet Sma Cheradenine Zakalwe & Diziet Sma | Fic

Anything, dear writer. Anything! This is my eternal fandom; the ship that will one day come. I love The Culture for its worldbuild and for its characters, so you can really hardly go wrong. If you want to pluck from my Yuletide letters of yore for this fandom, go right ahead.

Zakalwe / or & Sma

• What's their handler/agent relationship like? Tell me about how Sma gets Zakalwe back up on his feet, every time. Tell me how she feels about that. Or tell me about how Zakalwe is good enough to sometimes turn that relationship around on its head.
• A snapshot from middle- or late-career Zakalwe: someone who knows he's a Culture agent, but who also does not feel part of the Culture. How does Sma help/make him deal?
• Porn: Sma helps Zakalwe get over his... chair thing. Alternatively, Sma just helps Zakalwe discover sex in the Culture in general.

FOTNMC/Zakalwe

• Zakalwe and FOTNMC team up, within or without SC. What shenanigans arise? Professional slice of life is A+. Them professionally fucking up someone else's professional job, A++.
• AI/human sex, or interaction thereof. How do these two strange people establish a rapport? FOTNMC gets Zakalwe over any, ah, antiquated ideas about gender or sexuality.
• One or the other of them hearing *of* the other via third-party gossip and trying to figure out how much of what they hear is true.
• Helm's Deep challenge: they sit down, have a drink, and compare... statistics.

The Sparrow

Any | Fic

The Sparrow is wonderful on so many levels: I enjoy both the overarching poetry of the plot arch and the motivations of each of its characters, but also celebrate how MRR is fully willing to write micro-level interactions that celebrate everyday humour, grief, and love. Any style or pastiche you want to write this canon in, I'd love to read.

Emilio & D.W

• Early years them! D.W teaching Emilio how to deal with life. Especially D.W. teaching Emilio how to deal with life as Emilio - yanked out of La Perla - has never known it to be. D.W. teaching Emilio *nice things*, whether those are creature comforts (a nice hot mug of tea) or spiritual ones (a nice hot mug of tea delivered by someone who values him for who he is). My favourite line out of the book is possibly the observation by Anne about competency porn: how there is that Jesuit sense of doing ordinary things extraordinarily well. Show me those two at work! Show me D.W. teaching Emilio that patience!
• D.W. pining, but in a way that is good for his soul - and Emilio's, too. It's hard not to love Emilio - is it harder still to love him from a distance? Tell me more about how D.W. masters himself, and how he looks after Emilio without letting it trip over the precipice into something destructive or unrequited. I'd love to see him channel that energy into upkeep of Emilio throughout the years! How does D.W. make sure that Emilio is okay even as he is getting flung across the wide world?
• D.W. and Emilio play baseball. Just think of that for a bit. God. Or D.W. takes Emilio through a tour of Texan food!
• Something epistolary over the years! The two of them keep up a letter-writing tradition, maybe. Maybe it's even in Latin, or something that shows off Emilio's love for languages and D.W.'s appreciation of said passion

Emilio & Anne

• Anne pining. I'm sensing a pattern here...
• Emilio looking after Anne as much as Anne looks after him, in his small ways. How does that look like? Tell me about how he transforms her life and puts a little bit of faith-by-any-other-name into it: the recipes he teaches her, the language, the joys of service to the community. There's always this hint that Anne and George sit in this sort of - how do I describe this - suburban boomer comfort zone as two dual-income-no-kids educated couple, and that Emilio takes them and helps them find more (if not true) purpose as they head towards retirement. Tell me more about that!
• Anything that involves their mutual respect for each other: the more you're able to stick that into one of their professional settings, the more awesome. Emilio learning about emergency care in the leadup to their days on the spaceship. Or even on the spaceship, how the two of them defuse other people and support each other.

Emilio/Anne/George

• The Less Heinous: threesomes happen... without sex. Anne and George figure the earthly domain parts of it out; Emilio figures the ecumenical
• The More Heinous: goodbye, Emilio's oath. What happens?
• Not-So-Torrid-Twist: the three of them engage in porn. Food porn.

Anything that involves any of the options talking religion or lack thereof in relation to each other is also neat!

Hikaru no Go

Shindou Hikaru/Touya Akira, Ogata Seiji/Touya Akira, Ogata Seiji & Touya Akira, Kuwabara Honinbou & Ogata Seiji | Fanfic
Shindou/Touya

You can't go wrong with this classic! It'd be like messing up a hard boiled egg. You just can't. I love everything about the series, much like The Culture above, and as a bonus I love how it is paralleled by equally ridiculous real life Go as well as all the Alpha* machine-learning robots.

Shindou/Touya

AU, AR, crossovers, upside down and inside out, give me eternal rivals doing their thing.

• Late-stage Shindou and Touya in their 30s, 40s, 50s. What do they look like in some later generation? Or through the generations?
• Shindou learns classical Japanese to learn more about Sai. Hilarity ensues because he's bad at it.
• I love the idea of codependent rivals: tell me about what happens when one or the other of them have to be out of the circuit for a while. Whether for fun reasons (someone just goes on holiday, someone has to take a break because they slammed their fingers in the door...) or for serious ones (medical emergency, Touya family troubles in China)!

Ogata/Touya

I am (more than) fine with relationships with huge age gaps between them, and love it especially when there is development over time, or some other gap that inverts the dynamic.

• The older Ogata, watching this bright spark of a child go up through the ranks. How does he feel? When does it tip over from mentorship into something else? Is there jealousy? Is there jealous hate sex that helps Ogata work through things and mellow out?
• Touya has a Bad Day, and Ogata is there and... convenient. Touya needn't be nice about it at all

Ogata & Touya

On the flip side, I also love platonic relationships that cross that same age gap! In some ways, it's harder to simply be acquainted with someone who is that different from you: tell me more!

• First prompt from above, but platonic! What does Ogata feel about Touya - is he a rival? A kid he's seen grow up? A fellow Touya-group member?
• Ogata watching Touya grow up in the household that he does. Does Ogata think the kid needs to live a little? Or something else?
• Ogata and Touya get sent to tutor someone very, very rich. It is awful. They try to deal with it. Options: neither of them are good at covering up their disdain. Or Touya is when Ogata isn't. Or they are both incredibly good at it, and some third party who knows them both (Ashiwara?) watches in horror as they sweet talk people with sweet, sweet lies.
• Touya sets Ogata against Kuwabara. For fun. Or maybe the other way around...

Kuwabara & Ogata

Well, here's another eternal rivalry. Emphasis on the word "eternal"...

• Kuwabara haunts Ogata from beyond the grave. Not even well - just annoyingly
• The two of them talk about the Honinbou title and why it is so special
• Kuwabara (alive) employs psychological warfare against Ogata. Dirty, dirty psychological warfare, including but not limited to getting every vending machine and/or convenience store within blocks of the Ki-in to be mysteriously out of stock of any tobacco product, or something similar.

Crossovers

Tseng (FFVII)/Simon Illyan (Vorkosigan Saga), Cheradenine Zakalwe (The Culture)/Tseng (FFVII), Balthier (FFXII)/Tseng (FFVII), Rufus Shinra (FFVII)/Balthier (FFXII) | Art or fic

Argh, god, this section. I love corporate/structural entities, and boy does that show. Tell me about seedy underbellies of organisations, or sneaky thieves, or sneakier spies, or secret (and not-so-secret) agents, and black ops, and all the things in between.

Balthier/Tseng

Once upon a time, I wrote a modern-day stockmarket AU where Shinra and Bunansa collided. If you want to Balthier/Tseng or Balthier/Rufus in that domain, go riiiight on ahead. Otherwise:

• Balthier is a pirate. Balthier tries to pirate things from Shinra. Tseng captures him. Go dark! Or go funny! OR BOTH. Or invert it, and have Tseng try to steal secrets from Draklor. While Balthier is a Judge. Just saying.
• Mush FFXII and FFVII. Send Tseng on a mission to watch Balthier, or maybe even assassinate him. ??? Profit. Or sex. Or both?
• Balthier visits Shinra as a... business partner. Decides he wants to go where angels fear to tread and tries to figure out this Turk business.

Art thoughts: the both of them in Turk outfits. The both of them in Archadian outfits. The both of them set against the backdrop of Midgar or Archades. The both of them drinking together in a seedy bar - or a really nice one.

Rufus/Balthier

• All of the above for Tseng/Balthier, except flipped into Rufus-being-a-heir and Balthier-being-one-too and all the rich boy madness they could get up to
• Other way around: Rufus is a fallen Archadian noble who, ah, fights his way to the top

Art thoughts: the two with swapped outfits. The two as royalty - in any combination. Maybe one of them's a prince. Maybe they both are. Maybe one's a jester.

Zakalwe/Tseng

• Two agents, commiserating. Whether about how there's no good villainy left in the world anymore, or about how villainy doesn't do subtlty or shades of moral grey, or about their masters.
• Two agents end up colliding on a mission. Is there an... argument? A kerfuffle? Who wins? Do they both?
• Zakalwe appropriates Tseng to help on a Culture mission. Tseng adapts to life in space rather better than anyone might expect
• Tseng realises they have a, ah, visitor from space in their midst. Zakalwe adapts to life in Shinra better than anyone might expect...

Art thoughts: them in space suits! Them in suits! Them captaining a ship! Them captaining an actual boat!

Tseng/Simon Illyan

• Same as above again, where it applies. I have this... secret service/black ops problem, in case you haven't noticed
• Rufus is Emperor. Simon is head of ImpSec. Tseng is a new recruit. ???? PROFIT.
• Vorkosigan AU: Simon picks up Tseng to be an ImpSec agent

Art thoughts: both in ImpSec outfits! Both in suits!

Art Prompts In General

• Any art that crosses over the styles of the respective fandoms! Tseng in ImpSec outfits! Simon in a suit! Balthier styled FFVII-style! Rufus styled like an Archadian noble! Tseng IN SPACE with Zakalwe giving him weapons!
• I adore the Dragon Age Inquisition art style: anything in that wonderful, gilted pattern!
• Tarot cards!