Tweague

Trying to get my ducks in a row before I start posting Christmas-adjacent stuff! So here, for your delectation and delight, are two largely pointless and fluffy chapters of Variations, bringing me more or less up to date with this monstrosity. (There's a Christmas-adjacent chapter I need to post in a day or two for a prompt, so that's why these are getting shoved online now with such awkward alacrity.) There is smut, there is schmoop, there's not a lot of point, but here we are.

June, 1928: Incentive - rated E-ish, 1.8k (sub-2k!!! Go me!!!!), a brief missing scene from towards the end of the Samos chapter. Algy drops in on Erich at the office to tell him he's thinking of moving to Berlin for a few months. Erich is delighted.
September 1928 - January 1929: Contact - rated, oh I dunno, teen I guess, it contains one (1) use of the word 'fuck' and reference to vS bending Algy over the sofa. c.5k. Written as a giftfic for Gatty to the prompt 'touch-starved' because she really wanted Algy having a terrible notion of what constitutes reasonable levels of personal space in a relationship. Somewhat OOC probably, but hey, this is my terrible id-ish AU, I can make them be a bit soppy if I want.
(With apologies to philomytha for using the same title as her very very much better fic for the second one here - it's more or less a placeholder here as I am terrible at coming up with titles on the fly and I just wanted to post this quickly! Will change it when I have a thought in my head.)

Nah, let's post the chaos-bomb sex pollen AU chapter first, shall we.

So a while back I asked Gatty to prompt me for a fic, and somewhere at the bottom of a long and complex list of extremely interesting prompts there was ‘uhhhh idk sex pollen or something’ and I went BINGO THAT’S THE ONE. So here we are, I guess. You know things have got badly out of hand with an AU when you start writing AUs of it. So here we are: THE VARIATIONS-VERSE SEX POLLEN AU. It takes place somewhere around this point in continuity, after Algy has started getting a bit hot under the collar about von Stalhein but before he actually does anything about it. It is not canonical for the regular Variations-verse. Distinctly the Wrong Sort Of Trope for the main continuity.

This is an extremely classical sex pollen fic (so much so that it contains ACTUAL POLLEN, or at any rate spores: no plausibility handwaves, no wacky science, just pure botanical vibes). As such, of course, the consent is distinctly murky. However, under normal circumstances these two characters are very much attracted to one another and will shortly (in canon) get to the point of consenting very enthusiastically (though I guess the inherent set-up of this 'verse makes consent a bit ropey; damnit Erich); they just haven’t quite got themselves to that point yet in this story. As such, I personally don’t find the consent issue to be too problematic, but ymmv.

I uhhhhh went for a setting that is in keeping with canon but not in keeping with real life. It’s not worse than the average romance novel but it’s not better either. Beware mild period-typical orientalist troping related to Arabic desert peoples, a briefly-referenced made up ritual practice and one presumably dodgy Arabic phrase (thanks Google translate). My sincere apologies for all of this.

(Another time, another place): thirst, hunger, heat - Algy/von Stalhein, rated M/E (ymmv); dubcon because sex pollen. c.8.3k.

And another one! Don't worry, I will run out of material in a couple of days, then I can stop cluttering up your dashes with updates :D

July-December, 1927: Seven Entr'actes In Search Of A Finale - in which my titles and my tags both finally get completely out of hand. G, but with WE Johns-appropriate levels of hands appreciation, and we all know what that means. 8.3k words. Seven scenes over six months, as Algy becomes accustomed to Berlin and spending time with von Stalhein. With full supporting cast of Schubert quartets, Brecht-Weill commentary of dubious merit, references to the BBC Radio 4 comedy show 'Cabin Pressure', and gratuitous use of Welsh. Also Algy gets shot at, again, a bit.

Also, it has a playlist! Because my personal vice as a fic writer is my absolute compulsion to pretend that music which is of interest to me will also be of interest to the characters I'm writing about.

Okay. So here’s a tale from the Old Times. Back when I was last in Biggles fandom, in the old LJ days, there was an idea that a bunch of us liked to bat around. It was inspired, largely, by how much of a little sh*t Biggles can be to Algy. What if - we imagined - what if Biggles was *so* objectionable to Algy that von Stalhein saw his opportunity to break up the gang by seducing Algy away? Von Stalhein had, after all, mentioned how lucky Biggles was, in finding such a competent team; he even said that he’d tried putting such a team together himself. What if he’d taken the logical next step, and just - poached Biggles’ crew? One of our members, potatofiend, wrote a series of ficlets that were von Stalhein talking Algy into joining his team some time in the 1930s (there was a lot of tying Algy to chairs, iirc); others of us joined in. It was not a very serious notion. It was called the GPC scenario - the universe where Biggles acted like a Giant Psychotic Cock. (I still call it that in my file names, lol.)

It is possible that I might have got a *little* over-invested.

I jettisoned some of the elements that seemed harder to align with canon; substituted Algy and Biggles just having a truly wretched 1920s for the idea of Biggles being irrationally objectionable; and I idly prodded some ideas about the sort of tack von Stalhein might have taken if he really had wanted to bring Algy over to his side in the early canon. It ended up - like this.

This is where my tropiest tropes and most melodramatic instincts go to nest, I’m afraid. The grand sweeping Algy/von Stalhein epic no one asked for, complete with perilous missions, walks in the Tiergarten, Greek islands, and a sex-pollen AU, with a heady bouquet of ‘oh no this was a *terrible* mistake’ and a whiff of impending doom. At least, it will be Algy/von Stalhein eventually - some time around part 8, I think. Look forward to that.

For those of you who have read Gatty’s utterly delightful Polyphony, this is part of the background, or at least the start of it. I’ve so far written up to the start of 1929, so things haven’t fallen apart yet. But they will. NOTE: This will be heading, at least vaguely, into 1930s Berlin. Algy will be leaving in around 1933/34, and I’m not going to go into any great detail about - *gestures vaguely* - the general awfulness. I don’t think tropey Biggles AU fic is a great venue for that, surprisingly. But it will be hanging about in the background; inevitably. I will tag and warn appropriately if I get that far.

I’ve posted the first two sections on AO3 so far: I’ll probably post the next few over the next week or so. After that there’s no more until I write some more.

This is less me dropping a dead sparrow on the fandom's collective doormat, more of a whole dead swan. I’ve called the series ‘Variations’, which is dull, but probably better than The GPCverse, all things considered. SO. HERE WE GO.

November, 1923: Old Soldiers - c.3000 words, G rated. Algy chats with a ghost in the London mist.
August, 1926: Sanssouci - c.8000 words, G rated. They must stop meeting like this.