Arctic Light

Reveals are here, but since Ao3 is still having trouble, if you wrote/drew something in the collection that hasn't been revealed yet, you can force it to reveal by editing to take it out of the collection, save, and then edit again to put it back in. (If it's your actual assignment you can skip the second step because it automatically puts it back in. If you do need to edit it back in, type "trickortreatex2018" into the collection box; it won't autofill.)

Anyway, I wrote 6 things!

In Plain Sight (White Collar)
Mozzie helps Theo with his Halloween costume. This will certainly end well.

A quick treat I wrote after seeing a request for a WC Halloween story. I haven't written WC in ages and it was fun to revisit it.

Echo Echo (Defenders)
The Defenders, post-Snap.

I really wanted to treat Defendersverse requests, since I got really into it during the Trick or Treat writing period! This recipient said they liked ghosts and apocalypses, they wanted post-IW fic for Defenders, and they didn't mind if it was dark or sad. (Though really I think this is more hopeful than anything.) So this is a ghost-story version where the dusted characters stick around as ghosts. I had fun fitting the style of each section to the general style/tone of canon and the characters' canonical relationships, so Matt is like "GHOSTS DON'T EXIST, THIS ISN'T HAPPENING" while his ghosts chase him around the city trying to get him to eat a goddamn sandwich, etc. (Takes place after all current Defendersverse series and therefore contains spoilers for all of them. I wrote it before DD3 but it turns out to be compliant with it, go figure.)

All The Way Down (Alliance-Union)
Downbelow Station missing scene/tag. When the Norway pulled out of Pell at the climax, her riderships were left behind. This is what happened to one of them.

My actual assignment. I was delighted to be matched to chomiji and get to write the Hellburner characters again. This is something I've been thinking about ever since reading Downbelow Station and thinking about the Hellburner characters piloting one of its riderships and getting left behind. Canon actually contradicts this slightly, which I didn't realize 'til I'd written most of this - but oh well, I guess it's a slight AU.

Flowers for the Dead, Chocolate for the Living (Alliance-Union)
Halloween in space.

And then chomiji ended up on the treatless list, so I decided to use one of their actual prompts this time (because they give great prompts!) and write the Hellburner characters encountering Halloween (or more like an outer-space mash-up of Halloween and Dia de los Muertos).

Sanctuary (Punisher)
The Liebermans get a late-night visitor.

A not-so-anonymous-as-it-might-have-been treat for rachelmanija.

Soul Survivors (Benjamin January)
Ben still has a scar, a pale twist of flesh on the inside of his arm.

Another treat for someone on the treatless list. They listed soulmate AUs as something they like, so I thought about that in context of the Ben January books (which are set in the antebellum South) and came to what I guess is the second most depressing possible conclusion about soulmates in a world with hereditary chattel slavery. That being said, I don't think this fic itself is depressing at all, I mean, no less so than canon; I tried to get that bittersweet-hopeful tone that canon does so well. (I still wish I'd been able to come up with a less punny title for a story this serious, but that's the title that decided to stick.)