enemyofperfect | Snowflake Challenge #8: Recs

OMG, this is such a fun one. I love too many fics to pick three favorites (or even thirty favorites), but here are three of my favorites that I would like to recommend!

In Some Assembly Required by

valtyr, Tony Stark (from the Marvel Adventures continuity, which I know nothing about, but I didn't feel too left out) gets zapped by a ray that gives him the kind of body a cis woman might have. 50k of identity shenanigans, scrambling for a way to change back, and ill-advised sex with Steve Rogers ensue. And I love it so much! Ten years after its writing, some of the terminology's already a little dated, and I wouldn't hate it if Steve had caught up on his LGBTQ history just a little better, but Tony's feeling about his new body are still one of the most relatable depictions of gender dysphoria I've seen, and I remember how much it meant to me to find a magic body change fic that recognizes that trans people exist and matter. Plus, it's just incredibly readable and snappily written!

In Outsider Perspective by

Neery, John and Harold lose their episodic memories and have to fill in what they can from context. The conclusions they draw are imperfect, and when their memories return, they have to deal with the fallout of the new, equally imperfect assumptions they make in the aftermath. This fic is one of my all time favorites of Person of Interest fandom, which means it's running up against some pretty steep competition. But the character voices are spot on, the tropes are delicious, and the hurt/comfort is so good. 13k, but it always takes me as long to read as if it had twice the wordcount because I keep having to stop and just have feelings.

And then for light and the world's turning by

staranise, which is a little over 1k of Jupiter Ascending fic, I can't do much better than the prompt it was written for: Caine expected the sex and to do what he's told and to like it. He didn't expect to be taken care of and cuddled and thanked afterwards too. The thing I found so amazing about this fic, when I first read it, was the idea that it's possible to deserve and even receive gentle treatment while one is still broken, and lost, and untidy; that that isn't a reward reserved for people who are first able to fix themselves. Revisiting it now in the light of having finally watched Jupiter Ascending five years after the fact -- yeah, it absolutely holds up.