Remember that other-C&DP-story I kept talking about writing during those last couple of bits of Dogs of War and kept asking questions for? Well, this would be it.

Title: Good Intentions
Summary: Deadpool thought killing that 'Nathan' guy was going to be a fairly routine job. He couldn't have been more wrong.
Chapter: 1/?
Characters/Paring: Cable/Deadpool, X-Force
Rating: NC-17
Word Count: 6020
Warnings: Bordering on dubcon territory

Intro notes (because this is sadly not one of those stories that can get away without a lot of intro notes): AU fic, splitting from canon around New Mutants #98, a.k.a. Deadpool's very first appearance in Marvel canon, also being the first time he and Cable met. I am not sure whether, in good conscience, I can recommend people actually read that chapter if they haven't already, since we're talking Liefeld art in all its glory, and that is not the kind of imagery I'd want anyone to have in mind when reading this. All you really need to know is that Cable's still in his early days leading the New Mutants/X-Force team, and Deadpool's working for a guy who wants him dead, but when he breaks into the mansion he gets only as far as threatening Cable and having a brief fight with the kids before being shot by 'Domino' and tied up. Beyond that, I am going to be playing rather loosely with a lot of elements of the timeline – partially because it’s an AU, but also because the canonical timeline already contradicts itself in ways I cannot otherwise resolve.

So, yeah – C&DP fic set before C&DP started (and doubtless well before anyone at Marvel had ever considered giving either character a solo series, let alone an oddball team-up). If that wasn't bad enough, I may as well admit the idea is, at heart, really just a gratuitous PWP which probably wouldn’t have beyond idle speculation if it hadn’t then grown a surprisingly convoluted plot and backstory and continued to bug me until I got it down on paper. On the upside, if this does up and abandon me before I finish it, at least the first scene will stand well enough alone.

( Well, why do things halfway? )

For a bit of light relief between big projects, I thought I'd have a crack at one of the unfulfilled prompts off the kink meme - specifically one asking for Deadpool using his fourth-wall-breaking powers to 'fix' what the comics have done with him and Cable since their joint series ended.

This would have been lighter relief if it hadn't required me to actually read a couple of recent Cable chapters for material. While I must admit this did give me a certain amount of fun making stupid macros and horrifying friends*, I really miss the days when Cable's series was intentionally hilarious, rather than just unintentionally so.

*"Oh hey, now Cable's being eaten by a giant space whale! Now Bishop's being tentacle raped by aliens! Did I mention the same aliens can track Hope across a galaxy but don't know she exists when she's a couple of dozen metres away? IN SOVIET MARVEL, SHARK JUMPS YOU!"

As promised! If you've read the rest of the fic, you probably already know why I couldn't include this scene as a proper chapter (loud enthusiasm from certain readers notwithstanding). If you haven't, this is really not where you'd want to start...

A shame the 'penetraitor' gag was already done in the comic, it would have fit in nicely here.

Title: Let Slip the Dogs of War
Characters/Pairing: Cable/Deadpool
Summary: The missing scene between War and Deadpool, from between chapters 5 and 6.
Rating: NC-17
Word Count: 6860
Warnings: Some violence, explicit sex featuring seriously confused consent issues.
Previous Parts: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Epilogue 1, Epilogue 2

( I don't think I realised quite how much I'd missed writing Deadpool POV until I saw the final word count on this. )

Request fic for yhibiki, who spotted the most references in The Gratuitous Vampire AU and wanted Pants on a Stick-verse fic, with Sol flirting with Ky while Ky tries to help someone. Somehow, this is what resulted. I feel vaguely like I've just written a Discworld crossover by accident.

Title: The Third Degree of Denial
Summary: Ky's trying to be helpful. Sol isn't. From an outsider's point of view, sometimes it's hard to tell the difference.
Characters/Pairing: Sol/Ky, Sin
Word Count: 2030
Rating: PG

( It must be a hard job, being king. )

I would usually include a summary in the header, but given the content of the last part, I felt that pointing at the rating should pretty much suffice. (Why yes I have just posted an epilogue longer than any single chapter of the actual fic. Whaaaat? >.>)

Title: Let Slip the Dogs of War
Characters/Pairing: Cable/Deadpool
Rating: NC-17
Chapter: Epilogue 2
Word Count: 4030
Previous Parts: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Epilogue 1

( Epilogue 2 )

So I've spent a few days digging through old comics featuring Cable's pre-C&DP appearances. Yeah – this even despite everyone being so helpful as to answer with a big 'nah, don't bother' to my question about how much I should worry about getting early canon right. Don't think I'm not pleased with that response though – when it comes to the really early stuff, I can rarely work up the interest to do more than skim-read, so it's nice to know no-one expects anything more. Even despite how I'm usually a big fan of kid-superhero groups, it's almost embarrassing just how difficult it's been to work up any real interest in the New Mutants/X-Force team – even the ones I kind of want to like based on more interesting things that have been done with them since. Then there's Cable, who, well. It does make a change to see an adult who doesn't believe the kids have to be coddled and protected 24/7, but Cable in his earliest appearances is such a humourless bastard most of the time it's hard to find more than the barest framework of the character I liked so much in Cable & Deadpool.

The good news is they do start building on that framework earlier than I'd counted on (I'd have given up far sooner if they hadn't). I know I'm biased by how much I want to find things to like, but once you get to the issues where the clusterfuck that is his family history get dealt with, there's a lot of material I genuinely enjoyed. Among the really important things I hadn't picked up from bios and web-discussion are that Cable arrived back in time with no idea he was from that era – let alone that Cyclops was his father. He had no idea that Stryfe was his clone (ah, the advantages of face-concealing helmets), or that he even had a clone. When a guy is as high-and-mighty as Cable, goshdarn but it's fun seeing him thrown off his stride as hard as he was when all those revelations came out, and it finally made it possible to empathise with the guy. And at least when we do have to put up with his uncompromising-bastard moments, there's generally at least one character around going 'damn, I hate what an uncompromising bastard Cable is', which makes you feel a lot better about it.

( Assorted observations, a few recs, and the usual time wasted running off on a various tangents. )

Ah, where to start on this one? It ties in with a lot of embarrassingly detailed theories I've been toying with for ages about exactly how the Sol/Ky ship could have been quietly ticking away in the background of the series all along. It's based in part on an attempt to give the first GG game some actual plot, and just as much on one of the most gratuitous premises I could have come up with. It's the angstiest Sol/Ky fic I've written since Game Over. There are a couple more parts mostly written following this one, though it's been stalled for a while now. We'll see if getting part one posted gives me the impetus needed to get going on it again.

Title: Five More Years
Summary: Guilty Gear: The Missing Link didn't tell us much about Sol and Ky's reunion. This wasn't because there was nothing much to tell.
Characters/Pairing: Sol/Ky, others from the first GG game.
Chapter: 1/?
Rating: R
Word Count: 2990

( TLater on, when he needed an excuse, Sol would blame most of what happened next squarely on the fact that after five years, Ky had still had the nerve to look exactly the damn same. )

Minus a crucial paragraph or two that mentioned the broader context, this was originally posted as a standalone piece for an unrelated prompt on the kink meme. (If anyone actually guessed Dogs of War was the larger story it was destined to be part of, I will be very impressed.)

Title: Let Slip the Dogs of War
Summary: Wade gets around to dealing with a little unfinished business. And he never does these things by halves.
Characters/Pairing: Cable/Deadpool
Chapter: Epilogue 1
Word Count: 1100
Rating: PG
Previous Parts: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8

( Epilogue 1 )

Since I've consitently forgotten to mention it so far, belated thanks are owed to velithya for finding time to get whole monster betaed for me (in between making last minute arrangements for spending a couple of weeks out of the country, even). <3

Title: Let Slip the Dogs of War
Summary: War wasn't telling the whole truth about what happened to the Deadpool of his universe.
Characters/Pairing: Cable/Deadpool, guest staring the New Avengers
Chapter: 8 / 8
Word Count: 2420
Rating: R
Warnings: Not explicit, but contains references to torture, non-con and assorted other Evil Overlord AU-related staples. Also: Contains Deadpool.
Previous Parts: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7

( Part 8 )

The ramblings below are going to be mostly about Cable and Deadpool/Marvel Comics, but if anyone who's completely unfamiliar with that fandom wants to throw in their two cents on broader canonical-accuracy-in-fanfic issues, please do join in. I'm in a discussion-y sort of mood.


With Let Slip the Dogs of War mostly done now (main story finished, epilogue two off to the beta reader) it's time to get working on the next idea that's sunk its little plot-snake fangs into me for this fandom. The only trouble with this particular idea is that it requires a lot of early scenes set in the early New Mutants/X-Force era – and that's a bit awkward, because outside of the Deadpool-related issues, I've read next to nothing from that part of the series, and only have a very vague understanding about who was around and what was going on. Since the whole idea depends on sending the timeline veering into AU territory I have leeway to fudge the details, but I'm not going to get very far without mentioning anything about the non-Cable-or-Deadpool characters and conflicts from around then. More importantly, I run the risk of putting off people who do know that part of the series well by getting things wrong.

Sure, most of the people likely to read it will probably be in the same boat as me – in it for C&DP, and interested in their earliest appearances mostly for backstory reasons, but I've been thrown out of fic myself before because a minor character I'd gotten myself attached to was acting wildly OOC. * I should be making at least a token effort not to make the same mistake.

So, yeah – in short, I'm stuck in that old fanfic question: just how well should you know canon before you can get away with writing about it?

( Ah, the joys of comic book fandom )