This was my match story for the May 2010 fkficfest ficathon.  My thanks to wiliqueen for her prompt, in which Nick "has seen artistic revolutions come and go, and has his own perspective on the group of young people calling themselves the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood."  My thanks also to havocthecat and natmerc for beta-reading, swiftly and on-target.

The opportunity to sweep Nick and his concerns into this milieu was delightfully consuming.  The request to include real historical figures as supporting characters was a new challenge for me, and I learned a lot about balancing historical precision with storytelling momentum.  I have increased respect for those who do it well!

	•	Title:	"True to Life" (also on AO3)
	•	Length:	14,644 words
	•	Date:	Posted to fkficfest on May 16, 2010; not yet posted to FKFic-L
	•	Rating:	PG-13 (gen)
	•	Summary:	Janette visits Nick in his life on the edge of the Pre-Raphaelite circle; with her comes everything he is trying to escape.
	•	Setting:	1857 London
	•	Characters:	Nick, Janette, Others
	•	Quotation:	"How often had he truly rescued her, and how often had he unwittingly used her as bait -- or had she used herself?"

This is the story I contributed to the December 2009 oldschoolfic ficathon.  My thanks to senmut for her prompt of "Nick and Lacroix, Family Bonding," and to batdina, amilyn, leela_cat and much_madness for beta-reading and discussion.  This prompt nudged me to reacquaint myself with some episodes I rarely watch, and revisit some themes I hadn't touched in years.

	•	Title:	"In a Family Way" (also on AO3)
	•	Length:	~7,700 words
	•	Date:	Posted to FKFic-L January 30, 2010
	•	Rating:	PG-13 (gen)
	•	Summary:	Nick makes friends on a flight to Paris to see Janette, but Lacroix is on the same plane.
	•	Setting:	December 2009
	•	Characters:	Nick, Lacroix, Janette, Others
	•	Quotation:	"Your denial of the natural law does not alter it, Nicholas." / "Your rejection of hope does not defeat it, Lacroix."

      He was too late. The daylight had advanced too far. He made a desperate lunge for the door, hoping against hope that he could reach it before the burning forced him to retreat, but in his weakened state the light was too strong and the distance too great. He staggered back to the wall, the skin on his face and hands blistered and smoking.

pj1228

"The club was almost deserted, I was bored, and I thought perhaps two old friends could enjoy a talk and a bottle of wine."  He didn't respond.  She raised the glasses... "It's wine, Nicholah.  Just wine.  Nothing else -- nothing that could contaminate you."

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• "The Life of a Macedonian Vampire and His Son Alexander" by dj_clawson (16 posts)
  
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Happy Easter!  With this installment, we come to the end of my little fanfiction retrospective.  From now on, it's new or nothing!  (Unless I retype two or three dusty 'zine properties, perhaps.)

In December, much_madness challenged me to produce something short on a deadline, noting that she enjoys vignettes and "ficlets," and that I rarely write them.  She's right.  I have a tough time letting FK scenarios go when they're still small.  In reply to her, and inspired by something wiliqueen said while analyzing Blood Ties, I managed this:

	•	Title:	"Steamer Trunk Space"
	•	Length:	~1,400 words
	•	Date:	Posted to FKFic-L February 7, 2008
	•	Rating:	PG (gen)
	•	Summary:	Between the scenes of "Father's Day," Janette packs for the trip in pursuit of Nick.
	•	Setting:	1925 Paris
	•	Characters:	Janette, Lacroix
	•	Quotation:	"Prudence often dimmed and drifted, when it came to Nicolas."

The original idea-flash for this vignette came in the form of a comic-book storyboard with no speech balloons -- no words at all except the message on the answering machine and the date on the newspaper, something very like the silent "The Phoenix and the Carpet" interlude in the back of that issue of Classic X-Men -- you know the one, right? ;-)  But I don't have the drawing skills to execute that vision, so I wrestled the inspiration into prose instead.

The piece includes my best use of Miklos to date.  Re-reading it, I felt I should try to do more with his character.

	•	Title:	"By Expectation Beguiled"
	•	Length:	~1,900 words
	•	Date:	Posted to FKFic-L on July 28, 2006
	•	Rating:	G (m/f)
	•	Summary:	A shift at the Raven hinges on personal intangibles that have nothing to do with work.
	•	Setting:	Second season
	•	Characters:	Janette, Alma, Brianna, Miklos, Nick, Other
	•	Quotation:	"At first, she looked up each time the door opened.  But Janette soon shook her head and settled down to her paperwork.  ...  This was one of the nights when she felt how very good she was at what she did, and how much it was worth the doing."

Again prompted by the season, I'm going to tweak this rolling retrospective out of chronology to bring up my one New Year's fanfiction, "An Appointment Unkept," which is also my one true crossover to date.  In this case, the cross is Forever Knight/Highlander.  The story is less about those lost than those who miss them.

	•	Title:	"An Appointment Unkept"
	•	Length:	~2,982 words
	•	Date:	Posted to FKFic-L December 31, 2005
	•	Rating:	PG
	•	Summary:	Nick and Darius have a longstanding appointment, but neither of them make it.
	•	Setting:	Paris, New Year's Eve 1999
	•	Characters:	Original HL Immortal, Janette
	•	Quotation:	"She met his eyes, her own again a rich blue.  The depth of the sorrow there shocked him.  Carefully controlled, it nevertheless went down, and down, and down, perhaps without end."

Where did I get the idea that Janette is particularly good with numbers?  In "Can't Run, Can't Hide," where she does her own business taxes by hand and implies she checks her accountant's work?  I don't remember, but it's one of the character tidbits in "And So It Goes," which I wrote for a very good friend, to whom at the time I still felt obliged to provide ample evidence that I no longer believed Janette had died in "The Human Factor" (I was such an irritating newbie; you have no idea).  Thus this story, my first contribution to the Song Challenge, the longest-running fiction challenge in FK, originally issued by Susan G.

	•	Title:	"And So It Goes"
	•	Length:	~6,300 words
	•	Date:	Posted to FKFic-L in February 1997
	•	Rating:	PG-13 (m/f)
	•	Summary:	Janette sees Nick for the first time since he brought her back across in "The Human Factor."
	•	Setting:	In Paris after "Last Knight"
	•	Characters:	Janette, Nick
	•	Quotation:	"He looked haggard, thin, and he had a beard again -- shaving was always the first thing he neglected when he decided that ignoring his body would help save his soul."