Five Favorite Fics Wot I Wrote

antennapedia tagged me for this meme, and I've finally pulled together a list and a few thoughts on the subject.

5. Therapy.
I like this for the uneasy, eager, dorky, repentant-but-clueless Angel and the Wesley, who's still fumbling out of his carapace of nervous incompetence towards badass scholar/demon hunter. I'm very fond of the Sanskrit bit, too. Wesley/Angel is not a ship I sail with (After Wesley/Giles, Wes/Gunn rings my bells the most) but I enjoyed writing this. I felt so sad for Wesley when Angel was kissing up to Cordelia; it felt good to show Angel working to make amends with Wes as well. I am not satisfied with the title, but it gets the job done.

4. Never Spoken.
I like aftermath stories, and I wondered what the chocolate comedown would be like. The events of this story were always clear in my mind, but it took several tries to settle on a way of telling it. I like the allusions to the post-Becoming summer that the Xander-pov make possible, but there are things I really liked about the abortive Giles-pov version. Maybe that will see the light of LJ one day. Anyway. Bits of this that I particularly like are Xander's methodical tea-making, his desperate anti-arousal thoughts (Willow. Luge. Minesweeper. Willow.) and Giles' line "There's fuck-all to wear in there, unless I want to host a fancy-dress party as C.S. fucking Lewis." I also like "a hand-packed gallon of awkward with chunks of weird British slang."

3. Three Conversations in Liminal Spaces.
I owe this one to bethynyc's prompt "the beginning of a real relationship between them." So much more interesting (to me) than a first-time story. Which might explain why I haven't written any first-time stories.

I like this because it is a little bit of a romantic comedy, if you think of Buffy s3 canon as the "meet cute" in which the twu wuvvers hate each other, and the story being the Getting to Know You in which they recognize their attraction for each other. On rereading, I wish I'd found a less ex machina way to bring in the cat, and that perhaps I'd taken more time with section 2, but the whole AU still makes me ridiculously happy.

I'm particularly fond of the confrontation between Wesley and his dad, and the conversation in the attic.

2. Intransigence.
This scratches so many of my fic-writing-and-reading itches at once. It deals with what happened offstage during S7, and possible partial explanations for Giles' pod!behavior, and how events from Angel and Buffy synch up. And though it's a big shameless h/c-athon, I flatter myself that it's not absurdly shmoopy except in the dream. (Which is maybe cheating, but it makes me happy, dammit.)

1. When They Take You In.
I am terribly enamored of the elder Gileses, and the uncomfortable prodigal-son-ness of the whole situation, and the scene with Henry and Rupert and the crossbow, and the hints about Rupert's (not abusive, thankyouverymuch) childhood. When I reread it, there are a few bits of prose that I itch to replace or tweak, but overall I have a good feeling of (to paraphrase greyhoundliz on high-quality alcohol,) "yeah, I'd read that on purpose."