free to dissolve in streaming in summer

chocolate box fics are revealed! it was such a fun round, full of really amazing stories and art, and i've gotten very luck with two glorious gifts:

refuge (1034 words) by piscaria
バチカン奇跡調査官 | vatican kiseki chousakan | vatican miracle examiner (anime)
relationships: hiraga josef kou & roberto nicholas

hiraga falls asleep at roberto's apartment.

such a gentle, evocative, fragile scene, full of fraught love and grace and half-denied wishes and overwhelming - generosity, i don't know. closeness and love. everything i love about those two, succinctly and masterfully summed up.

encore, or else (24406 words) by naye
fandom: gintama
characters: sakata gintoki, shimura shinpachi, kagura (gintama), sadaharu, katsura kotarou, shimura tae
additional tags: yorozuya family, hurt/comfort, torture, kidnapping, canon-typical violence, canon-typical vomiting, angst with a happy ending

turning down a job request makes the yorozuya a dangerous enemy - one who will use any means necessary to get gintoki under his control.

incredible hurt/comfort fic that goes alllllll the way there, hitting all the tropes on the way, and that manages to get exactly and effortlessly what gintama even is - absurdity, references, darker stories underneath, families of choices, feats of devotion and heroism followed not made less incredible by fart jokes, and vice versa. this fic made my heart grow like eight times, oh yeah.


i wrote two stories too!

can't take the kid from the fight (3250 words)
魔法使いの嫁 | mahou tsukai no yome | the ancient magus bride
relationships: michael renfred & alice
additional tags: hurt/comfort, sickfic, families of choice, implied/referenced child abuse

alice will make michael proud if it kills her.

old-fashioned orphanfic with all the ridiculous found family goodness i could stuff into it, and two plots going at once. i had a lot of fun with it, and i like how it turned out.

you couldn't have it any other way (2583 words)
final fantasy xv
relationships: noctis lucis caelum/ignis scientia
additional tags: hurt/comfort, serious injuries, confessions, episode ignis spoilers, alternate universe - canon divergence, first kiss, chocolate box treat

“were you ever going to tell me?”

“of course not,” ignis says. there’s no need for explanations: of course not. it’s a horrible thing, the weight of ignis’ love, had always been. the burns are rough and cold under noctis’ fingers.

(au where the conversation in cartanica goes very differently.)

the story of my ignominious descent into ffxv is best left for another time, but here's an attempt to recreate and somehow fix all the devastation this damned game visited on me, with as much high drama as humanly possible. with bonus impalement.

can't wait for the next year to play again.