Dear Candy Hearts Author

[bustedxflush]

Hi, I’m great_whatsit at AO3! First and foremost: THANK YOU! I am so lucky to be getting a gift from you, and I’m immensely grateful for the time and energy you're putting into this. Taking the time to do something like this is a huge deal.

 

In terms of narrative I’m pretty easy to please, and any rating and/or combination of gender identities and bodies is cool with me. That said, I do have a few DNWs, mainly: extreme or explicit violence, non-con, horror, and A/B/O.

 

Things I love (but in no way require) in fic: found family, sex that is urgent, angry, awkward, or familiar and full of laughter (or all of the above), complicated or fucked up power dynamics (please never think anything in this department will be Too Much), quiet devotion, humor, bittersweet endings, day in the life snapshots, tragically stoic characters who only one other person understands, damaged people who are trying, whether it's just to do as little harm as possible, or to heal themselves, even a little (😭😭😭😭😭😭).

 

All of that said: everything that follows is mere suggestion, nothing more. I am already over the moon that anyone else shares any of these interests, and is willing to write something about one of them for me. Anything you come up with will be incredible.
REQUEST 1: Briarpatch (TV)

Here is my old Yuletide promo post for this amazing show, here is the trailer, and here is a short featurette about the main characters; it runs 10 one-hour episodes and is still on Amazon Prime.

I cannot tell you how much I love this show, or how much sexual tension is running through its veins. If you've watched it and are familiar with the characters, please feel free to write whatever you want for any of the pairings I've nominated!

If you would like suggestions, here are a few:

 

Jake and Allegra. In episode 8 (AKA my favorite Briarpatch episode and one of my favorite episodes of TV ever), when Jake is listing the qualities that made Allegra so hot, and which make him regret not making a move on her in high school (this is a canon fact with which I strongly disagree btw), he SPECIFICALLY says that she was the "meanest" girl he knew, which is a positive. GOD. Please write me high school Jake and Allegra: her being her usual badass self, and him just, like, panting after her, not knowing why he's so into this mean, impatient girl, only that he very much wants her to do mean things to him. Or Jake and Allegra now — there's so much UST between them — show me how it gets resolved, and how things end up! 

 

Jake and Clyde Brattle (note: dubcon is more than ok with these two). In case you're not familiar with the show and are reading this, all you need to know is that Alan Cumming plays this shady ass fucking arms dealer/very bad man whose all-male minions HAVE BAR CODES TATTOOED ON THE BACK OF THEIR NECKS. AND JAKE HAS ONE. Jake also experience serious trauma (and did illegal things) while in the military during a Gulf War or two, and Brattle is very much part of that. The two of them are the main reasons I’ve watched episode 8 so many times: there’s so much in their first meeting since they were in the Middle East, not just volumes of terrible history but also absolute oceans of UST. The power dynamic between them is royally fucked up, too, in that Jake gives into no one except Allegra (who he's pretty much canonically in love with), but then Brattle shows up and Jake almost falls apart — just the awareness that Brattle is nearby nearly breaks him. WHY? What happened? Show me all of the awful things that went down between them! Or, if you're more inclined to recovery, show me Jake putting himself back together (Or someone else doing it? God, is it Brattle?) until he's the guy who meet in the show — and is that guy really back together at all?

 

Allegra and Cindy McCabe. Funny story — Cindy was literally supposed to be in just one episode, but Allegra Edwards was so good in the role they rewrote a bunch of stuff and she ended up in, I think, all but two of the 10 episodes. And with good reason! Cindy is such an amazing character — a woman completely at ease with her body and her sexuality, smart as a fucking whip, spectacularly resourceful, and with no interest whatsoever in what other people think about or expect from her. And she and Allegra have amazing chemistry — Allegra is checking her out as hard as Cindy is checking Allegra out in their first meeting, and I can 100% see them getting together a time or twelve off screen. ANYTHING about them would thrill me.
 

Request 2: Professional Chess RPF

 I know next to nothing about chess, but I discovered José Raúl Capablanca through his cameo in Chess Fever and was immediately fascinated. He's handsome, and impish, and so charismatic, and I love that the gag of his role in the film depends entirely upon the audience knowing who he is by sight. I know the USSR was chess mad at the time, but still — imagine that level of celebrity, for a Cuban guy in the USSR in 1925! 

 

I still don't know a ton about him, but I do know he was one of the best to ever play the game, that he was a social butterfly and popular with the ladies, and that he had an intense rivalry with Alexander Alekhine (Look how handsome and annoyed they are together!), and that eventually things were so tense that they wouldn't even play in the same tournaments. Fellas! What's all that about, hmmmmm? 

 

Because of my limited knowledge of chess, I'm interested more in his personality than his game, but the other folks I've nominated are all major figures in the sport with whom he played important matches, so I'm completely down with learning about chess from someone who knows it well, through the lens of Capablanca and tournament play!

 

(I find Akiba Rubinstein and his tragic fate particularly interesting, so if you're someone with a passion for him and his story, please go off! I know he and Capablanca intersected to only a limited degree, but they were in the same circles, and I'm confident you could manage some groovy overlap!)

I'm sorry I've not got real prompts here, but if you're familiar with any of the nominated folks, I would be honored to get whatever that about them that you've been itching to write.

Request 3: Mr. Soft Touch (1949)

Available here. This is my favorite Christmas movie: it's the one I watch every year, and my heart grows three sizes every time. It's about a guy robbing the mob (they robbed him and killed his partner first) and trying to get away with it, while also falling in love with the woman who runs a settlement house, and trying to resist being the good person he actually is inside. It's messy in terms of tone, but it's still lovely and, most lovely of all, is the relationship between Joe Miracle (the thief/ex-mob guy) and Early Byrd, a columnist who knows everything about everything, including that Miracle is the guy the mob is looking for, even before the mob knows it.

 

When Byrd talks about Miracle, there are actual hearts coming out of his eyes, and in their scenes together, they stand waaaay too close, and Byrd is waaaaay too relaxed for a dude who is theoretically threatening a violent criminal. Honestly, it's more Byrd being completely in love with Miracle than it is a mutual thing, and I am pining to read about them the way that Byrd pines for Miracle.

 

Prompts

• Miracle realizes that Byrd has a crush on him (really, it's not hard to figure out) and they have extremely angry, very not gentle at all sex, which is probably what Byrd wants anyway, so it's cool. (By the same token, though, I would die to read something super sweet between them, and see Byrd astonished that Miracle actually wants him too.)
• Byrd's POV: what he thinks about Miracle, what he wants to happen, how hard (or easy) it is for him to betray this guy by whom he's so utterly fascinated.
• I would also LOVE an AU that throws them together in a slightly different context — as long as Byrd is pining, I'll be happy. Like: Miracle an outlaw and Byrd a sheriff in the old west? Miracle a 1930s PI and Byrd a shitty criminal who is always around, like he wants to get caught or something?

 

Request 4: X-Over → Wynn Duffy (Justified)/Clyde Brattle (Briarpatch)
Justified is on Hulu, but it's like 8 seasons and you should not watch it just for this fic.

 

Wynn Duffy is my favorite Justified character. I love how he's not a cold, perfect criminal, but instead simply a very talented survivor — no matter what happens, he finds a way to survive, intact and (outwardly) undamaged. The idea of Wynn Duffy in his van running into Clyde Brattle in his van is delicious to me, because Brattle is genuinely evil and, while Duffy is not, he can find a way to fit into almost any situation, if he needs to in order to survive. So, what would they be like together? I am sure Brattle would terrify Duffy because Duffy is insightful and a smart man, but what would Brattle think of Duffy? How would he want to use him and his abilities? How would Duffy present himself, in order to have the best chance to ingratiate himself with this insane, seductive monster? 

 
Request 5: The Postman Always Rings Twice (movie 1946)
Available here, if you do ok.ru; also on Criterion Channel + rentable at the usual places.

I am obsessed with the way Cora is with Arthur Keats. (Note: dubcon is more than ok with these two.) If you've not seen the movie, in this version of the story, Keats is her lawyer, and literally the only one who can get Cora off balance. She's completely in charge in her relationships with both her husband and her lover, and she's a dominant presence in the rest of her life, too — an authority figure so sure of her own power that no one dares brook it. But Keats does. Not only that, but he expects Cora to obey him — and she does. Y'all, it's so incredibly hot to watch them together: he is casual in his command because he knows she'll give in, and she's, like, both furious and angrily curious, because she's literally never met anyone who can do this to her?

As someone who is into fucked up fictional power dynamics, this relationship is on my personal Old Hollywood Mount Rushmore. I would weep with joy to read anything about these two, the dirtier the better. I'm not even sure that Keats is into girls (a throwaway line tells us he's got a wife, but his relationship with the DA is so casually close I would 100% believe they were a couple), or even if physical intimacy is his thing, but he likes power, and I would love to see him using it on Cora is a more ~private~ setting, whether or not it was explicitly sexual. How does she get her head in a place where she can accept what he can do to her? Or does she never get there, and their relationship is never anything other than deeply unhealthy and badwrong (but also: hot). Either of their POVs would be fascinating, because Cora is not stupid, and she can improvise like the rest of us breathe — can she even handle being at this dude's mercy, no matter how hard she tries to regain the upper hand? And what does Keats think of her? Is she just someone whose mind he wants to fuck with because he can, or is it more than that? Different?

Also, I'm super into evil!hypnosis movies recently, and I love the idea of Keats as a stage hypnotist, and Cora as either his assistant or some girl who ends up interacting with him (extra points if she's all "this shit is so fake come on"), and falls under his sway.
 

Request 6: Harper

Available here, if you do OK.ru. Rentable at the usual places.

 

If you've not seen it, Harper is loosely based on Ross MacDonald's series about an LA private eye; Paul Newman plays the private eye in question and he's great: a self-loathing asshole who hates mostly everyone, and no one more than himself. There are two people he doesn't hate: his bff Albert, and a boy pilot involved in the case Harper is working. The pilot's name is Allan Taggert, but the very not heterosexual Harper calls him "Beauty" instead (he's played by young Robert Wagner, so he's not wrong).

 

While in my head Albert and Harper have a deep, intimate relationship developed over the course of many years, Beauty is this kid Harper JUST met, but by whom he's fascinated, and it's very striking how little effort he makes to hide it. I would love love love to read your take on their relationship. Is this what Harper is always like with men he fancies, or has something happened that has made him just not give a fuck anymore (he's in the middle of a divorce in the movie, for example)? And I want to know what Beauty thinks of Harper: how would he respond if Harper made a move on him? Or would he make a move on Harper? They're both strikingly disinterested in the young, hot girl who chases them both pretty aggressively — does that mean anything? Beauty seems to actually be the carefree guy Harper sometimes pretends to be, and I can see him being just bored and 1960s hipster enough to fuck a dude just to see what it's like, but how would Harper handle that? He acts all emotionless and hard, but he's a mess inside — is he even capable of a casual fuck with a guy he actual maybe likes? Just — ANYTHING! Anything about the two of them interacting, naked or not, would delight me.