Trope Meme!

[rsadelle]

Pick a trope from this list and provide a fandom/pairing and I'll tell you something about the story I'd write for that combination (i.e. write a snippet from the story or write not!fic or tell you the title and summary for the story I would write).

1. genderswap
2. bodyswap
3. drunk!fic
4. huddling for warmth
5. pretending to be married
6. secretly a virgin
7. amnesia
8. cross-dressing
9. forced to share a bed
10. truth or dare
11. historical au
12. accidental-baby-acquisition
13. apocalypse fic
14. telepathy
15. high school / college au

I restrained my impulse to annotate this list (What is "drunk!fic" anyway? Is it just fic where people get drunk? How does that reach the level of a trope?), but since I've seen other people do it, I did cross out the things that made me hesitant to do this meme for fear that someone would want me to write them. I will take hockey prompts, obviously, and possibly other things - feel free to ask and I'll see if it's something I think I can do.

Comments

A Sacred Exchange (3/3)

[rsadelle]

Things are good. They're playing hockey again, just the way Sid wants to, everything he's ever wanted, and while he still sometimes picks up bits of Geno's dreams, there aren't any more of the sad ones he shouldn't have been able to feel anyway. Sid mostly forgets about those for a while, until the day Tanger brings his kid to the rink.

He's tiny, under a year old, but old enough to be a little aware of his surroundings. Sid gets to hold him for a while, until Geno elbows into his space and says, "My turn. Soft hands, easy pass."

Sid chuckles, and hands the baby to Geno, so he can have his turn before they have to go do something that isn't stand around with an adorable baby.

Sid had been speaking mostly French, but Geno talks to the baby in Russian, and maybe it's that or maybe it's that the baby is taking up Geno's conscious attention, but Sid gets a flash of too many things in quick succession to make sense, and then that same sadness and loneliness from Geno's dreams, no matter how impossible that is.

Geno doesn't look sad, or lonely. He looks happy, delighted to be saying whatever it is he's saying to the baby, and the feeling only lasts a few seconds.

The memory of it lasts longer, and this time Sid pays attention to it. It was easier to dismiss when it was just a dream, but harder when it's something he felt when they were both awake.

He nudges Geno into his car after practice, and makes them both lunch. They keep talking about practice - Sid thinks they can do better with their passing; Geno thinks he's worrying too much - but Geno shuts down the mental side of their conversation for a moment when Sid flashes on the visit with Tanger's kid.

Sid opens his mouth, closes it, opens it again. "Do you want a baby?" is what finally comes out. "Is that why you were sad this summer?"

Geno looks like he's going to deny it for a moment, and then he floods Sid with a host of images of kids and babies and Sid holding Tanger's kid, along with a long mix of Russian and English that's too fast and garbled for Sid to get more meaning out of than that he was right.

"So many kids," Geno says, and now he actually looks sad. "And little ones, babies. Visited them at the-" he flashes a series of images at Sid, a building, kids, adults who aren't their parents.

"Orphanage?" Sid suggests.

Geno nods. "Not wanted. I want."

He looks so miserable that Sid frowns with him. "You could," he says. "Adopt one of them, or something."

Geno makes a face. "Big mess." He sends the rest of it mentally, fuzzy images of imagined press coverage, him with a baby alone, a rosier image of him with another indistinct adult and a baby.

Sid absorbs all of that, turns it around in his head, wraps it up with the kind of media attention he's used to, and says, "It would be like that anyway, however you got or had a baby, right?" He doesn't wait for Geno's agreement before saying, "So you should have a baby if you want one. Or an older kid. Or whatever."

"Hard to do alone," Geno says.

"We could do it together," Sid says before he can talk himself out of it.

"You would?" Geno asks, and he sends an image of the two of them and a baby in a Penguins jersey that's clear but also manages to be a question.

Sid grabs onto the image greedily, because they look so happy in it, and they would be. "Yes," he says. "The media circus would be worse and we'd need a nanny" - he sends back the image with a hazy person waiting by a stroller in the background - "but yes."

Geno grins at him, and even though he shouldn't be able to, Sid can feel how happy he is.

--

End note: Title loosely taken from Jamie Lee Curtis: "We look at adoption as a very sacred exchange. It was not done lightly on either side. I would dedicate my life to this child."