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3WFDW: The People with Disabilities Being Awesome Commentfic Fest
Welcome to the People with Disabilities (PWD) Being Awesome Commentfic Fest!
I love people with disabilities doing awesome things. In the spirit of Festibility at
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access_fandom I thought: "What better time to celebrate people with disabilities being awesome than three_weeks_for_dw ?" (In the shower this morning, because I am the best planner ever.)How it works:
This is a multi-fandom fest celebrating characters with disabilities doing awesome things! Prompts can be from any fandom, and can feature canonically, non-canonically or supernaturally disabled characters. (Are Remus Lupin and Sookie Stackhouse awesome PWD? You betcha!) You can interpret an undiagnosed character as a PWD, or reimagine someone as one.
ETA 4/28: No restrictions on rating. Sorry that was unclear!
But what do you mean by "being awesome?"
I mean a lot of things: Saving the world, going on adventures, facing off against ableism, hanging out with friends, struggling with changes in identity. A prompt/story doesn't have to be happy to be awesome.
Prompting:
Prompts should have the following format:
Fandom, character/paring, prompt.
For crossovers: Fandom 1/Fandom 2, character/pairing, prompt.
You can leave as many prompts as you like. Also, please use respectful language in your prompt.
Filling Prompts:
If you fill a prompt, either post your story as a reply to the prompt-comment, or post a link to your story as a reply to the prompt if it's hosted elsewhere (say, your journal). Also, prompts may be filled more than once.
ETA: You may also fill your own prompts, if you wish.
Warnings:
You may use "Choose Not to Warn" or "No Warnings Apply," or use warnings/content notes for any triggering material.
Questions?:
Feel free to ask me questions! I've never, ever run a fest before (I'll plan this better next year, I swear), so I probably left stuff out.
no subject
Fill: Highlander, Fight Another Day (PG, no warnings, ~1000 wds)
--
It's not the fighting he minds so much as the little things.
Learning to brush his teeth and his hair left-handed. Doing up buttons. Taking a shower, for pete's sake.
He has to learn everything again. The fighting is only part of it, and not even the biggest part, even though that's what his friends keep pushing him into. He knows they're worried; they're afraid a head-hunter is going to come after him before he's ready.
He doesn't know if he'll ever be ready.
For four hundred years, his body has been a finely tuned instrument, a weapon at his command. All that he's learned since he was a young man in Glenfinnan, all the new fighting techniques and skills that he's traveled the world to acquire have been merely refinements to the foundation that was already there. He's always thought himself so adaptable, so quick to pick up new skills, new ideas. Now everything he used to know is in shambles, and he's not sure if he can pick up the pieces. He was a fighting prodigy. Now he's --
"Now you're like the rest of us, MacLeod," Methos says. "Deal with it."
They won't give him sympathy and they won't leave him alone. In bygone days, he used to seek out the best fighting teachers to learn to be even better than they were. Now his teachers are Amanda and Methos, who are far from the best swordfighters he's known, and Joe, who can't duel at all. But what they're good at is the thing he needs to learn: how to win in a fight by something other than sheer swordfighting prowess. Guile, cunning, deceit, the careful and clever uses of technology and strategy -- this is what they're good at, this is what he needs to learn, but even though he's no slouch at strategy in general, this new way of fighting doesn't come easily to him.
They show him the ways of guns and hidden knives and poisons. He hates it, resists it. It feels like cheating.
"It is cheating, that's the point," Amanda says, and throws up her arms in despair.
"It's not cheating," Methos counters. "This is about winning, MacLeod. Fair doesn't enter into it."
"It always has for me," he says, turning away from them.
"Then you'll have to change or die," Methos says to his back.
They don't understand. Sometimes he thinks it's more that they won't understand. But they also drill with him patiently for hour upon hour, as he learns to mirror all the moves that he'd practiced so many times with his dominant hand. It's not that he doesn't know how to fight left-handed at all, but it's not what he's best at, and worse, all his reflexes are predicated upon having a right hand, either carrying a second sword or trading off with the left. The disadvantage of having four hundred years of combat training is that it's also four hundred years of habit he has to unlearn. He's lost count of the number of times that he's flipped his sword from his left hand to the hand that isn't there, sending it skittering across the dojo floor.
"I don't know if I can do it, Joe," he says one night, late, after a few too many drinks, as he's helping Joe close up the bar. "I don't know if I can win a challenge. All the practice in the world, and all the weapons that Methos and Amanda can hide on me, won't make up for the fact that I'm going to be at a serious disadvantage against a skilled opponent."
"Don't fight, then. Do what Methos does, and split."
"That's not always possible, and you know it." Not without giving up more than just a hand. There are things he's not willing to sacrifice.
"Well," Joe says, "I know where I could get a good sniper rifle."
"Don't even joke about it. One on one," Duncan reminds him. "That's how it has to be, how it always has to be. The alternative is war, Joe. Imagine it. Immortals banding together into gangs, hiring mercenaries, stocking up on arsenals of explosives and biological weapons. It wouldn't just be us that'd die -- it would be mortals, too, by the thousands."
And they've both seen, with the Hunters, how changing the rules ripples out in a cascade of other changes, touching and destroying lives. He's afraid of that, too -- afraid that embracing Methos and Amanda's style of fighting will mean another step closer to the same kind of anarchy that marked those dark days.
But life is growth, life is change. It's not always possible to know where the changes will lead. All that they can do, any of them, is take it day by day, step by step.
Live, Highlander. Grow stronger. Fight another day.
And when it finally happens, when he finds himself standing with the katana in his left hand and his right tucked into the sleeve of his coat, facing an opponent with a chilling reputation and a two-handed bastard sword gripped in two powerful hands -- he feels the fear wash through him, and drain away, leaving only quiet confidence in its wake.
Because he's not sure if this is what they were trying to teach him, but it's what he learned: that the fight, in the end, is not about skill after all.
It's about confidence.
It's about winning because he needs to win, because he will, no matter what it takes -- but he'll do it on his own terms, too.
He can feel the comforting weight of the gun under his coat, the knife strapped to his leg, but he doesn't think he'll need them. They're just talismans anyway -- and behind them he can feel the presence of Amanda and Methos and Joe, of all those long days in the dojo, all those long nights in Joe's bar.
Duncan swings out the katana with a graceful flick of his wrist. It's easy now, almost effortless. Six months ago, it wasn't.
Grow. Change. Live.
"I am Duncan MacLeod of the clan MacLeod," he says, and the words resonate in him as they always have.
Re: Highlander, Fight Another Day (PG, no warnings, ~1000 wds)
Re: Highlander, Fight Another Day (PG, no warnings, ~1000 wds)
Re: Fill: Highlander, Fight Another Day (PG, no warnings, ~1000 wds)
Re: Fill: Highlander, Fight Another Day (PG, no warnings, ~1000 wds)
I'm kinda on the fence about that one myself. I was going off what happened to Xavier St. Cloud, but there really wasn't much elapsed time between when he lost his hand and when we saw him again (less than a year, I think?). But they'd almost have to be able to have some sort of regenerating ability; it's impossible to believe that someone could live as long as the older Immortals, in a world as rough and dangerous as the past used to be, PLUS having regular duels with sharp-edged objects, and not lose body parts. And clearly they can heal so cleanly they don't leave scars, and presumably regenerate internal organs, so it's not out of the question that they can regenerate missing parts as well, given time.
It is possible that they just don't know if it'll grow back or not, and in 20 or 50 years, Duncan will be completely surprised by having two functional hands again. *muses thoughtfully*
Re: Fill: Highlander, Fight Another Day (PG, no warnings, ~1000 wds)
I presume a finger wouldn't take as long to grow back, relatively speaking, but losing an entire arm as Xavier did would take quite a while, and it makes sense for one year to not have been anywhere near long enough.
Perhaps regeneration of this sort is absolutely possible, but not many immortals know it because too often when they lose a body part, it hampers their fighting enough that they get killed before it grows back. So Methos is absolutely aware that it's possible, but Duncan doesn't, maybe? Or maybe he knows that a finger or something would grow back, but doesn't know whether the ability would extend to larger parts of the body? Something like that.
Trying to figure out all the mechanics of Highlander style Immortality is always fascinating!
Re: Fill: Highlander, Fight Another Day (PG, no warnings, ~1000 wds)
That actually makes a lot of sense to me. In fact, if they can do that, it makes sense that not many Immortals would know about it. That kind of large-scale regeneration might be a really rare situation for any of them to encounter, partly because the adjustment period after losing a body part would make them more vulnerable in the Game, and partly just because of the law of averages catching up with them -- staying alive long enough to regenerate completely is probably rare even if a missing hand or foot doesn't actually change the playing field all that much in the long run, because most of them simply don't live that long.
And even for those who've done so, it might not be the sort of information that Immortals would be likely to share among themselves -- it seems to me that even the segment of the Immortal community who aren't obsessed with the Game (the Duncans and Fitzes and Roberts and Ginas of the world) would probably be somewhat paranoid when talking to their friends about fighting techniques and healing and such. You might trust someone with your life and still not exactly want to come out and say "So I got my leg cut off back in 1612 and it had grown back by the French Revolution; anything like that ever happen to you? :D?"
I'm still on the fence about it myself, especially in terms of actual canonicity -- it makes logical sense based on what we've seen (the near-total absence of canonically disabled Immortals, when you'd think there would be lots), but based on St. Cloud and possibly Kalas as well (the neck injury), I do get the impression that certain kinds of injuries don't heal. And I wrote the story from the point of view that it's permanent (or, at the very least, that the characters think it's permanent, though that's kind of an after-the-fact bit of retcon *g*). However, there are enough inconsistencies in canon, especially when it comes to the physical properties of Immortals, that you could probably make just about ANYTHING fit depending on circumstances. *g*
Re: Fill: Highlander, Fight Another Day (PG, no warnings, ~1000 wds)
Re: Fill: Highlander, Fight Another Day (PG, no warnings, ~1000 wds)
... how sad is it that now I want to do a whole series of these? Because Duncan's was the first one that popped into my head, but I also think it would be very interesting to explore Methos's reaction to the same situation -- having to adapt to fighting one-handed. Because he'd have a whole host of issues of his own, but his issues would be different from Duncan's ...
Re: Fill: Highlander, Fight Another Day (PG, no warnings, ~1000 wds)
Re: Fill: Highlander, Fight Another Day (PG, no warnings, ~1000 wds)
*hugs*
Re: Fill: Highlander, Fight Another Day (PG, no warnings, ~1000 wds)
"There are things he's not willing to sacrifice."
I appreciate how you used this change to cut to the core of Duncan's character -- his identity and his honor -- and to contrast his understanding with his friends'. Duncan's striving for fairness and justice isn't, as Methos and Amanda sometimes seem to think, a privilege of his superior skill, a luxury he can indulge because he's the best; it's the heart without which there is no life.
I liked the use of four centuries to unlearn as a bigger challenge than starting from scratch would be, and the blade tossed to a hand not there to receive it.
If this had been a longer and wider sort of piece, I would have loved to have gotten to share Duncan ruminating on now being in the position in which he put Xavier, and also on Joe, particularly, whether this unusual shared status makes it harder or easier for them to connect, when it first happens.
Again, thanks.
Re: "There are things he's not willing to sacrifice."
it's the heart without which there is no life.
Yes, this. That is the core of Duncan for me. His sense of honor and justice is not something he can put on and take off like an overcoat. It's the deepest essence of who he is.
Re: Fill: Highlander, Fight Another Day (PG, no warnings, ~1000 wds)
aw, duncan! *hearts*
Re: Fill: Highlander, Fight Another Day (PG, no warnings, ~1000 wds)