scrubjayspeaks

Snowflake Challenge promotional banner with image of gingerbread Christmas trees, a silver ball, a tea light candle and a white confectionary snowflake on a beige falling-snowflakes background. Text: Snowflake Challenge January 1-31.

Challenge #10: In your own space, rec a fanwork (fic, art, vid, playlist, anything!) you did not create.

So, I had been all ready to sing the extensive praises of thepartyresponsible and their crossovers and AUs. Except, whoops, I already did back when I started binging all their stuff. Which I will reiterate, because goddamn, it's all so good. The whumptober posts, in particular, make me both feel like I want to write fic again and like doing so might actually be accessible. I mean, most of these are not really complete stories. They're just short fills that sort of start the concept, you know? And yet, I enjoy reading them immensely. So that must mean that I, too, could write short fragments and someone would enjoy them.

To rec something new, though, I offer up Carelica's Two Colors, White and Gold. Steve/Bucky, though Bucky is mainly alone in the arctic wilderness of a post-apocalyptic Russia for the majority of the story.

Storytime: as a kid, I read My Side of the Mountain, a book about which I remember nothing in the specifics, though the cover art is perfectly preserved in my mind's eye. But it managed to kick off a sort of half-formed fascination with wilderness survival and self-sufficiency. I would still like to learn more about proper wilderness survival, though my interest in self-sufficiency has ultimately transmuted into an interest in sustainable agriculture practices and old-fashioned skills and hobbies. All of which is to say, yes, Carelica's tag "1001 poetic uses of an SAS Arctic Survival Guide" was basically calculated to attract me.

And it is poetic. My gods. It is stunning. The cruel beauty of the landscape is breathtaking. The switch between glacial slowness and drowning urgency had me reading like one possessed. Truly one of the most gorgeous pieces of fiction I've read, period. It's also a story about rediscovering who you are and learning to make connections and deciding to survive for your own sake. It's about a plague and isolation, too, which is a hell of a thing to be reading in 2021. It's about small comforts amid global, cosmic suffering. It's about making pine needle tea and building fires and sharing both those things. I cannot recommend it strongly enough.