In A World That Wants To Shove Advertisements In Our Face Every Second Of Every Day, Do You Realize How

Thank you for all the Wolfwren fic. I’ve loved every single one of them. I am blown away by how you keep churning them out. Wishing you a wonderful holiday season and a very happy new year. 😊

Thank you very much <3 If I'm being honest I've also surprised myself a lot with how quickly and how many stories I've been able to write since I started but it has been a blast, and I'm really glad you've loved them as well :) Happy holidays to you as well!!

it just be like that I guess

It’s Been a Long Long Time (CarolMaria fanfic)

A/N: Here’s an extract of my new CarolMaria story. It’s just fluff set in a WW2 AU. If you want to read more, the link for the full story will be at the end of the post.

They swayed with the music, slowly. Carol had turned out to be the most clumsy of the two, her sock-clad feet accidentally stepping on Maria's feet often enough for Maria to make fun of her. After a while, the blonde had gotten the hang of it, and now she only stepped on Maria on purpose, to push herself just a few inches up and place a kiss high on Maria's cheek.

The trumpet was replaced by the voice of a singer, and Maria closed her eyes and let the lyrics sink in. Carol watched her do with a smile. She placed a kiss on her neck and closed her eyes as well, sighing happily. Her breath tickled Maria's neck, who couldn't quite hold her smile. They basked in each other's warmth, even if it wasn't a particularly cold night. Maria's fingers moved slightly. She found the edge of Carol's skirt. Her shirt would usually be tugged inside, but after a day of frantically running around looking for a job, the shirt had moved and bundled and turned. Maria barely had to pull on it to find Carol's warm skin underneath, and the scar she had left from that time she'd been shot. Carol shivered when she felt Maria's finger gently caressing her scar. She didn't stop her. She'd come so close to death that time, it was good for Maria to remember that she was still there, in her arms, and she didn't plan on going anywhere else anytime soon.

Behind them, on the couch, Carol's orange tabby cat had fallen asleep a long time ago, stretched on the length of the couch itself as it belonged to her. So they were three then, Carol realized with a smile. Three in a tiny apartment in Greenwich Village that was not even big enough for one.

"We should move out..." Carol breathed out against Maria's neck.

Maria opened her eyes and smiled.

"Where to?" she asked jokingly. "We barely had the money to rent this place for the month."

Carol removed her head from Maria's collarbone to her lover's sadness and looked at Maria's face.

"Well, I have an idea, but you'll have to hear me out."

Maria placed a kiss on Carol's forehead as they continued to sway. The song had stopped and after a brief silence, another song started. It was a French song the soldiers had brought back with them to America. The melody was catchy, calling for an energized dance. Carol and Maria continued to gently sway, their rhythm unchanged by the music. Maria didn't understand the lyrics. Carol understood a little, after all, you didn't spend two months in a French war hospital without picking up a few things. It was a love song, that much she was sure of.

"How about we move to England?" Carol suggested.

Full story link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19112068

The Injury of Finally Knowing You - A Wolfwren fanfiction

A/N: Hello everyone! My brain has been filled with nothing but Wolfwren for weeks and because I couldn't wait I decided to write my own season 2 of Ahsoka! Here is an extract from the first chapter and the link to the full chapter will be at the end! Enjoy!

Sabine expected to feel more of a pounding in her head when she woke up. After all, someone had snuck up behind her and knocked her out. Maybe she’d grown used to being hit in the head. Huyang certainly seemed to take pleasure in doing so during her training sessions. Perhaps she ought to thank him for it now that she woke up with barely a dull pulse at the back of her head. She quickly assessed her surroundings.

Daylight passed through the walls of the tent; the leather too thin to block it out. She was tied to the central pole of the tent, so that if she pulled too hard on the bindings, she might collapse the whole structure. She was unarmed. Her lightsaber and blasters had been taken. However, she remained in armor, which was always an advantage. No one had been stationed in the tent to keep an eye on her. She might as well make the most of it, she thought as she pulled on her bindings. The wooden poll tremble with every harsh tug.

The Ravagers had rushed the Noti camp on the back of their howlers. In the middle of the night, Sabine had only had a moment to understand what was happening. She’d jumped out of the T-6 and rushed after her master. All the campfires had been extinguished, either by time or by their attackers. She spotted Ahsoka’s white light on the right side and figured she would cover their left flank. Somehow in the chaos of metal blades glimmering in the night and blaster shots, she had been knocked out and captured.

She doubted Ahsoka had also suffered the same fate. Hopefully her master would track her down. She wasn’t confident in her ability to navigate the wilderness yet. She tugged on the leather straps and the whole tent rattled. A few more hard pulls and she would be free, she figured.

The flap of the tent was thrown open, allowing harsh midday light within and blinding Sabine for a second. Someone entered and she stilled her tugging. The footsteps were angry. They crushed the earth as if trying to show just how superior to it they were. When Sabine had blinked the light out of her eyes, she looked up only to find herself confronted by a familiar wrathful face.

Shin’s platinum blond hair had grown an inch since they’d been stranded on the planet, revealing more of those dark roots at the top of her head. Sabine almost offered her pair of scissors but thought better of the jab when she saw her eyes. They were full of fury and sorrow in equal part, darkness and misery and tiredness and agony. Sabine was stricken by such grief when she saw her that she couldn’t speak.

“You failed,” Shin said. “Thrawn escaped.”

The accusation was just what Sabine needed to get her thoughts back in order.

“I also sent Ezra home. I accomplished what I set out to do. What did you accomplish?”

Shin glared at her. It was intense, but Sabine could take it.

“Why are you still here?”

Sabine frowned.

“I don’t know. Maybe because we’re just as stuck as you are?”

Shin shook her head.

“I don’t believe that. You must be here for another reason.”

“And the reason is that we are stuck.”

Full story here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/50827036/chapters/128401468

The Search for Wyrd - a Wolfwren fanfiction

A/N: Hello everyone! This is the beginning of the first chapter of my new fic, a sequel to "The Witching Hour". If you want to read the whole chapter, the link will be at the end! Enjoy :)

Shin remembered jumping in puddles after the rain and watching how the light shattered under her feet; the reflection of the nearby storefront interrupted, then, as the puddles became placid again, appearing as solid as the real thing. She remembered breaking a lightbulb of the already poorly maintained streetlights by kicking a ball too hard, and running home before anyone could spot the culprits, a gaggle of children laughing off their mistake. She remembered following her mother around the stalls, gathering ingredients for supper and ingredients for potions. Rarely had a place held so many memories for her, but as she walked down the busy streets of Swanpond, it all came flooding back.

Shin let her feet take her, as if after all this time they still remembered her way home. The stores had changed. Some of the houses looked the worst for wear. Time had taken its toll, added a few cables arching over the street, a few cracks in the walls and a few stains on the windows. Shin thought she would have to pull her map out, when, all too soon, she was standing in front of the right building.

Her heart skipped a beat in her chest, making her light-headed. What were the odds of her mother still living in that basement, waiting for her, after eighteen years? She could be anywhere in the galaxy. But a flicker of hope still nestled in her brain. Perhaps she had spent too much time with Sabine. With anxiousness in her chest and more optimism that she usually allowed herself, Shin walked up to the door and knocked.

“Coming, coming…”

The door opened to an old Weequay woman wrapped in a teal shawl. She looked up at Shin with a frown. Though Shin recognized her, she had forgotten her name. She remembered only that her mother had specifically instructed her no leave the old woman alone, lest she kick them out.

“Can I help you?”

“I’m looking for a Zabrak woman. Her name is Wyrd. She lived here last I heard.”

“You a client?”

“Not exactly.”

The old woman continued to stare Shin down with a deep frown, the folds of her leathery skin almost covering her eyes.

“She’s not in trouble, is she? She was a good tenant for many years, I’d hate it if she got into trouble.”

“No, she’s not…” Shin paused as she caught up to what the woman had said. “She’s not here anymore?”

Her heart seemed to stop then, to compensate, start up like a furious horse. Her hopes dashed against the ground of Coronet City. The woman hesitated another second. Then, finally, she opened the door wider.

Full Story Here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/53409133/chapters/135179428

Miserable Orpheus - a Wolfwren fanfiction

A/N: Hello everyone! I'm back with a new multichapter story, loosely inspired by "Portrait of a Lady on Fire." It's a Painter/Model AU set in 19th century France. Here is an extract but if you want to read the whole first chapter, the link will be at the end!

Shin was surprised to find a young woman, perhaps a few years older than her, sat at a squared table against the wall. A notepad and a box of charcoal stencils took up most of the table, her empty glass of wine pushed to the edge, so close that it threatened to fall off. She was sketching something. She focused on the page for a moment, then looked up. Her brown gaze met Shin’s through the window, and Shin realized that she had been sketching her. The artist avoided her eyes. Shin stared back for another second, then turned away to look at the water cascading in front of her.

Her fingers dug into the sleeve of her dress. She had run out of desperation, without a plan, but now that she was faced with the reality of what she had done, she knew she needed to come up with a plan. She would not survive long on her own, with no money and nothing but a name she could not use. Of course, there were ways for women to make money in this world, places for them to find refuge, but she would rather not think of it.

She was still pondering where to go, where she could stay in this huge city that she had so rarely visited in her life before, when she heard the door to the café open once more. She did not look to her side, at first, not until she notice that someone had come to stand beside her. She turned her head, and her eyes met the curious gaze of the artist. She was wearing man’s clothes, brown overalls over an off-white shirt. Her head was covered by an old flat cap. She had tugged the sleeve of her notepad under her arm. With the other, she pulled out a pipe from her pocket.

“I knew I should have taken a coat before going out,” she said, her tone amused, as if she were trying to make Shin laugh.

Shin rolled her eyes, not in the mood to talk. The artist tugged her pipe between her lips and pulled out a matchbook. She lit a match and brought it to the edge of the pipe, puffed a couple of times, then shook the match out, throwing it into a puddle. The aromatic smell of tobacco surrounded Shin. It smelled better than the one her father smoked.

“Yours is a story I’d love to know.”

“I’m not in the mood to talk,” Shin replied, her tone like vinegar.

“I don’t mean to be impolite, I promise. Just not every day you see a drenched bride standing around here.”

“Wasn’t drawing me without my permission enough for you already?”

The artist only shrugged. She tugged the pipe between her lips once more and reached for her notepad. Unclasping the leather cover, she opened to show some of the sketches she carried. After a second, Shin glanced. The young woman had sketched some of the patrons inside the bar, talking, laughing, reading, one of the waiters carrying a tray. She was the final sketch, the back of her as she stood there, the waves and dips of her dress as water dripped off it.

“I thought it was a challenging thing to draw,” the artist mumbled around her pipe. “Sketches are just training, it’s not to show anyone. If I offended you, my lady, I apologize.”

Full Story Here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/64248484/chapters/164904373

SO HERE IS THE WHOLE STORY (SO FAR).

I am on my knees begging you to reblog this post and to stop reblogging the original ones I sent out yesterday. This is the complete account with all the most recent info; the other one is just sending people down senselessly panicked avenues that no longer lead anywhere.

IN SHORT

Cliff Weitzman, CEO of Speechify and (aspiring?) voice actor, used AI to scrape thousands of popular, finished works off AO3 to list them on his own for-profit website and in his attached app. He did this without getting any kind of permission from the authors of said work or informing AO3. Obviously.

When fandom at large was made aware of his theft and started pushing back, Weitzman issued a non-apology on the original social media posts—using 

his dyslexia; 

his intent to implement a tip-system for the plagiarized authors; and 

a sudden willingness to take down the work of every author who saw my original social media posts and emailed him individually with a ‘valid’ claim,

as reasons we should allow him to continue monetizing fanwork for his own financial gain.

When we less-than-kindly refused, he took down his ‘apologies’ as well as his website (allegedly—it’s possible that our complaints to his web host, the deluge of emails he received or the unanticipated traffic brought it down, since there wasn’t any sort of official statement made about it), and when it came back up several hours later, all of the work formerly listed in the fan fiction category was no longer there. 

THE TAKEAWAYS

1. Cliff Weitzman (aka Ofek Weitzman) is a scumbag with no qualms about taking fanwork without permission, feeding it to AI and monetizing it for his own financial gain; 

2. Fandom can really get things done when it wants to, and 

3. Our fanworks appear to be hidden, but they’re NOT DELETED from Weitzman’s servers, and independently published, original works are still listed without the authors' permission. We need to hold this man responsible for his theft, keep an eye on both his current and future endeavors, and take action immediately when he crosses the line again. 

THE TIMELINE, THE DETAILS, THE SCREENSHOTS (behind the cut)

Sunday night, December 22nd 2024, I noticed an influx in visitors to my fic You & Me & Holiday Wine. When I searched the title online, hoping to find out where they came from, a new listing popped up (third one down, no less):

This listing is still up today, by the way, though now when you follow the link to word-stream, it just brings you to the main site. (Also, to be clear, this was not the cause for the influx of traffic to my fic; word-stream did not link back to the original work anywhere.)

I followed the link to word-stream, where to my horror Y&M&HW was listed in its entirety—though, beyond the first half of the first chapter, behind a paywall—along with a link promising to take me—through an app downloadable on the Apple Store—to an AI-narrated audiobook version. When I searched word-stream itself for my ao3 handle I found both of my multi-chapter fics were listed this way:

Because the tags on my fics (which included genres* and characters, but never the original IPs**) weren’t working, I put ‘Kara Danvers’ into the search bar and discovered that many more supercorp fics (Supergirl TV fandom, Kara Danvers/Lena Luthor pairing) were listed.

I went looking online for any mention of word-stream and AI plagiarism (the covers—as well as the ridiculously inflated number of reviews and ratings—made it immediately obvious that AI fuckery was involved), but found almost nothing: only one single Reddit post had been made, and it received (at that time) only a handful of upvotes and no advice. 

I decided to make a tumblr post to bring the supercorp fandom up to speed about the theft. I draw as well as write for fandom and I’ve only ever had to deal with art theft—which has a clear set of steps to take depending on where said art was reposted—and I was at a loss regarding where to start in this situation.

After my post went up I remembered Project Copy Knight, which is worth commending for the work they’ve done to get fic stolen from AO3 taken down from monetized AI 'audiobook’ YouTube accounts. I reached out to @echoekhi, asking if they’d heard of this site and whether they could advise me on how to get our works taken down.

While waiting for a reply I looked into Copy Knight’s methods and decided to contact OTW’s legal department:

And then I went to bed.

By morning, tumblr friends @makicarn and @fazedlight as well as a very helpful tumblr anon had seen my post and done some very productive sleuthing:

@echoekhi had also gotten back to me, advising me, as expected, to contact the OTW. So I decided to sit tight until I got a response from them.

That response came only an hour or so later: 

Which was 100% understandable, but still disappointing—I doubted a handful of individual takedown requests would accomplish much, and I wasn’t eager to share my given name and personal information with Cliff Weitzman himself, which is unavoidable if you want to file a DMCA.

I decided to take it to Reddit, hoping it would gain traction in the wider fanfic community, considering so many fandoms were affected. My Reddit posts (with the updates at the bottom as they were emerging) can be found here and here.

A helpful Reddit user posted a guide on how users could go about filing a DMCA against word-stream here (to wobbly-at-best results)

A different helpful Reddit user signed up to access insight into word-streams pricing. Comment is here.

Smells unbelievably scammy, right? In addition to those audacious prices—though in all fairness any amount of money would be audacious considering every work listed is accessible elsewhere for free—my dyscalculia is screaming silently at the sight of that completely unnecessary amount of intentionally obscured numbers.

Speaking of which! As soon as the post on r/AO3—and, as a result, my original tumblr post—began taking off properly, sometime around 1 pm, jumpscare! A notification that a tumblr account named @cliffweitzman had commented on my post, and I got a bit mad about the gist of his message :

Fortunately he caught plenty of flack in the comments from other users (truly you should check out the comment section, it is extremely gratifying and people are making tremendously good points), in response to which, of course, he first tried to both reiterate and renegotiate his point in a second, longer comment (which I didn’t screenshot in time so I’m sorry for the crappy notification email formatting):

which he then proceeded to also post to Reddit (this is another Reddit user’s screenshot, I didn’t see it at all, the notifications were moving too fast for me to follow by then)

... where he got a roughly equal amount of righteously furious replies. (Check downthread, they're still there, all the way at the bottom.)

After which Cliff went ahead & deleted his messages altogether. 

It’s not entirely clear whether his account was suspended by Reddit soon after or whether he deleted it himself, but considering his tumblr account is still intact, I assume it’s the former. He made a handful of sock puppet accounts to play around with for a while, both on Reddit and Tumblr, only one of which I have a screenshot of, but since they all say roughly the same thing, you’re not missing much:

And then word-stream started throwing a DNS error.

That lasted for a good number of hours, which was unfortunately right around the time that a lot of authors first heard about the situation and started asking me individually how to find out whether their work was stolen too. I do not have that information and I am unclear on the perimeters Weitzman set for his AI scraper, so this is all conjecture: it LOOKS like the fics that were lifted had three things in common:

They were completed works;

They had over several thousand kudos on AO3; and

They were written by authors who had actively posted or updated work over the past year.

If anyone knows more about these perimeters or has info that counters my observation, please let me know!

I finally thought to check/alert evil Twitter during this time, and found out that the news was doing the rounds there already. I made a quick thread summarizing everything that had happened just in case. You can find it here.

I went to Bluesky too, where fandom was doing all the heavy lifting for me already, so I just reskeeted, as you do, and carried on.

Sometime in the very early evening, word-stream went back up—but the fan fiction category was nowhere to be seen. Tentative joy and celebration!***

That’s when several users—the ones who had signed up for accounts to gain intel and had accessed their own fics that way—reported that their work could still be accessed through their history. Relevant Reddit post here.

Sooo—

We’re obviously not done. The fanwork that was stolen by Weitzman may be inaccessible through his website right now, but they aren’t actually gone. And the fact that Weitzman wasn’t willing to get rid of them altogether means he still has plans for them. 

This was my final edit on my Reddit post before turning off notifications, and it's pretty much where my head will be at for at least the foreseeable future:

Please feel free to add info in the comments, make your own posts, take whatever action you want to take to protect your work. I only beg you—seriously, I’m on my knees here—to not give up like I saw a handful of people express the urge to do. Keep sharing your creative work and remain vigilant and stay active to make sure we can continue to do so freely. Visit your favorite fics, and the ones you’ve kept in your ‘marked for later’ lists but never made time to read, and leave kudos, leave comments, support your fandom creatives, celebrate podficcers and support AO3. We created this place and it’s our responsibility to keep it alive and thriving for as long as we possibly can.

Also FUCK generative AI. It has NO place in fandom spaces.

THE 'SMALL' PRINT (some of it in all caps):

*Weitzman knew what he was doing and can NOT claim ignorance. One, it’s pretty basic kindergarten stuff that you don’t steal some other kid’s art project and present it as your own only to act surprised when they protest and then tell the victim that they should have told you sooner that they didn’t want their project stolen. And two, he was very careful never to list the IPs these fanworks were based on, so it’s clear he was at least familiar enough with the legalities to not get himself in hot water with corporate lawyers. Fucking over fans, though, he figured he could get away with that. 

**A note about the AI that Weitzman used to steal our work: it’s even greasier than it looks at first glance. It’s not just the method he used to lift works off AO3 and then regurgitate onto his own website and app. Looking beyond the untold horrors of his AI-generated cover ‘art’, in many cases these covers attempt to depict something from the fics in question that can’t be gleaned from their summaries alone. In addition, my fics (and I assume the others, as well) were listed with generated genres; tags that did not appear anywhere in or on my fic on AO3 and were sometimes scarily accurate and sometimes way off the mark. I remember You & Me & Holiday Wine had ‘found family’ (100% correct, but not tagged by me as such) and I believe The Shape of Soup was listed as, among others, ‘enemies to friends to lovers’ and ‘love triangle’ (both wildly inaccurate). Even worse, not all the fic listed (as authors on Reddit pointed out) came with their original summaries at all. Often the entire summary was AI-generated. All of these things make it very clear that it was an all-encompassing scrape—not only were our fics stolen, they were also fed word-for-word into the AI Weitzman used and then analyzed to suit Weitzman’s needs. This means our work was literally fed to this AI to basically do with whatever its other users want, including (one assumes) text generation. 

***Fan fiction appears to have been made (largely) inaccessible on word-stream at this time, but I’m hearing from several authors that their original, independently published work, which is listed at places like Kindle Unlimited, DOES still appear in word-stream’s search engine. This obviously hurts writers, especially independent ones, who depend on these works for income and, as a rule, don’t have a huge budget or a legal team with oceans of time to fight these battles for them. If you consider yourself an author in the broader sense, beyond merely existing online as a fandom author, beyond concerns that your own work is immediately at risk, DO NOT STOP MAKING NOISE ABOUT THIS.

Again, please, please PLEASE reblog this post instead of the one I sent originally. All the information is here, and it's driving me nuts to see the old ones are still passed around, sending people on wild goose chases.

Thank you all so much.

Life Could Be a Dream - a RubyxChristina fanfiction

A/N: Hey guys! Here’s an extract from the first part of my new two-shot, in which Christina inherits a strange book. If you’re interested, the link to the full story is at the end!

"What are we looking at?" Ruby asked.

"A book," Christina replied.

Ruby rolled her eyes.

"I couldn't have guessed it myself. And something tells me this isn't the kind of book we want to open."

Christina touched one of the cogs on the cover, making it turn one notch to the right. They held their breaths, but nothing happened.

"We need the combination," Christina said.

She looked more closely at the mirror in the middle of it all, in case something was hidden inside. All she saw was her eye staring back at her.

"Again, should we open it?" Ruby asked. "It could be trapped. If those Butchers didn't really like your father but wanted him to have it, it probably wasn't out of the kindness of their hearts."

"I've thought of that."

Christina pulled on the straps lightly, but they wouldn't budge. She looked at the back of the book, but there was nothing. She was pulled out of her thoughts when she felt Ruby's hand on her shoulder.

"I know that you're excited about a possible new magic book, but it's locked for a reason. And I don't need to remind you that you're not as equipped to deal with magic as you used to be. The mark is one thing, but whatever's inside, it might be stronger than the mark."

Christina pursed her lips.

"What do you suggest?"

"I'm not going to stop you from trying, because I know then you'll go behind my back. Just promise me that you won't try to open it if I'm not there. I'll place a circle around the book, make sure whatever's inside is contained in case it tries to come out."

Christina looked at Ruby. Under her tutelage, Ruby had made immense progress in the past year, and she was now a very competent practitioner. Christina never tired of hearing her lover speaking so confidently about magic.

"What?" Ruby asked.

Christina pulled her into a kiss.

"Nothing. You get started on the circle, I'll go get some things that might be useful."

Full story here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27709844/chapters/67818128

Winter’s War and a Dream of Spring (The 100/Game of Thrones AU)

A/N: You’ve waited and here it is! I promised a year ago I would include Lexa into season 8, and after much anguish and work I did it! The first chapter is up for your enjoyment! Here’s an extract and you can find the link to the full chapter after!

Lexa remembered the first time she ever saw snow. They were almost at White Harbor, from which they would continue to Winterfell on horseback. She was seating on the deck of the ship, a book in her hands, trying to distract herself from the boring journey. Suddenly, something fell on her hand. She hadn't noticed it at first. The cold air had taken over the entire ship almost as soon as they had left Dragonstone, and Lexa had been wearing furs and gloves without fail every single hour of the day. She was so wrapped up in her furs that she could have been mistaken for a small chubby wolf easily.

Something fell on her hand again, and then on her book, and then on her head. She frowned and looked up. Tiny white snowflakes were falling over them, plummeting from the sky with feather-like grace. Lexa gasped and her eyes grew wide.

“Is it snowing?” she asked, to no one in particular.

Since no one answered her, she closed her book and pushed herself up. Snowflakes continued to fall on her. She put her hands together like a cup and tried to catch as many snowflakes as she could. Unfortunately, they were all falling slowly, and almost as soon as they touched her hand they melted. She barely had any time to look at them closely before they'd disappeared forever.

She walked back and forth on the ship's upper deck, her hands reached out to grab snow, for almost ten minutes. Sometimes she would try to reach overboard, thinking there would be more snow falling into the sea, but it was mostly in vain. The sailors watched her do with amusement, which Lexa didn't seem to notice.

“Lexa?”

Lexa stopped dead in her tracks and looked over at the corridor which led further down into the ship. Her mother was standing there, hidden from the snow, Jon by her side.

“What are you doing?”

“It's snowing, mother, look!”

Lexa ran up to her mother, her hands still cupped together. By the time she reached Daenerys, however, all the snow in her hands had melted again. Her mother, however, had no difficulty seeing the snow, as many white flakes had tangled themselves in Lexa's dark brown hair.

“It is,” Daenerys replied, agreeing with her daughter.

"Don't get too excited," Jon added, "There's snow everywhere at this time of year."

Still, Lexa ignored Jon's comment and started running again around the ship, trying to collect snowflakes, until the air had grown so cold and bitter that she could barely feel her face. Then, Anya took it upon herself to drag the six-year-old back to her room and sit her down under a pile of blankets, where she left her until it was time for supper.

Link to full story: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20689520/chapters/49142075

The Letter - a RubyxChristina fanfiction

A/N: Hey guys! Here’s an extract from my new Ruby/Christina story, where Christina receives a letter from Ruby that wasn’t meant for her. If you want to read more the link to the full story will be at the end!

It all started with a letter, Christina would tell her. The moving crew was still bringing her living room out of the truck when she opened her mailbox. It was a warm late October day, considering the Chicago weather. Although she hadn't put her name on the mailbox yet, she went to check in case any ads and fliers had been slipped in. However, when she opened the box, there was only one letter, seating neatly at the bottom of the mailbox. Christina pulled it out and inspected it.

The letter had gone through the proper channels if the stamp was anything to go by. Apparently, the letter had been waiting there for almost a month. And it wasn't even for her. The address was correct, but the house on Hyde Park no longer belonged to one William Davenport, who had moved with his wife and children to who knew where some month and a half ago. Christina had bought it just two weeks ago.

As she walked back inside, dodging big sweaty men in jumpsuits carrying boxes and armchairs and chunks of furniture up the driveway, she flipped the letter over. There was a return address, fortunately. To Ruby Baptiste, though Christina later had to check a map to know the exact location of the building. The South Side, a medium-sized apartment complex near the highway. Christina left the letter on her kitchen counter and promptly forgot about it, busy as she was ordering the moving crew around. She would return it eventually, she thought.

That evening, as she sat down in her partially built living room, eating pizza and channel surfing, she remembered the letter. Or rather, she spotted it again when she went to get a glass and a bottle of wine in the kitchen. She picked it up and brought it back to the living room with her. She poured herself a large glass and stared at the letter. It had been sitting in her mailbox for a month. Whoever had sent it didn't know the previous owner had moved out. She certainly hoped it wasn't too pressing. Her leg began to bounce as curiosity slowly ate away at her decency. Finally, after five long, agonizing minutes, she broke. She opened the letter.

There were two sheets of paper inside, folded together. The bottom one seemed to be the results of a blood test. Christina didn't remember hearing the previous owner had been a doctor. Then, she read the other piece of paper, hand-written.

 I'm pregnant and you know it's yours. I don't care if you want it or not, but you better help or I'll talk to your wife.

Well, that explained the sudden move, Christina thought. Something told her the wife already knew he was having an affair. But they moved before they could learn about the child he had fathered behind her back. Christina sighed and folded the letter back in the envelope. It certainly wasn't addressed to her, or even her concern. She discarded the letter and turned back to the TV.

Still, she couldn't quite get the letter out of her mind. She couldn't help but think about this young woman who was still waiting for an answer. Would she eventually come knocking on Christina's door, only for Christina to have to break the truth to her? She really didn't want to have anyone crying on her front porch. The better thing would be to return the letter the next day. But would they even let her return an open letter? She sighed. She was supposed to meet with Tic anyway, she could take a small detour to bring the letter back. Break her the news, give her back the letter, and move on with her own problems.

Christina sipped some wine and leaned back on her leather couch. It sounded like a good plan.

Full story here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28403304/chapters/69596649