18A
By Toyourdetriment
CBR16 Bingo: Part 1
Summary from the author: Ronan gets drunk at the JFK Chili’s. There’s an elf and anaphylaxis.
Ronan hears a soft curse behind him. “Fine, yes, I’m a doctor, keep them upright, hold on.” He turns around and fucking elf prince Adam’s goddamn head of red dust fucking hair. Adam is a doctor. Adam has been behind Ronan the whole flight.
This is a fanfic about two of the main characters in Maggie Stiefvater’s series The Raven Cycle and its spinoff The Dreamer Trilogy.
The AU (alternative universe) has Ronan and Adam as full grown adults in their late 30s meeting in a 5am sleep-deprived haze at a Dunkin’ Donuts in JFK’s arrival’s terminal.
Ronan is instantly smitten, but runs away as doesn’t trust his mouth and half-asleep brain to function well enough to talk to Adam.
Lo and behold, they end up on the same flight from JFK to DC, where Adam, a neurosurgeon returning from a conference in NYC, has to grudgingly administer first aid to a fellow passenger. Ronan, a writer of smutty spy thrillers, accidentally shares the WIP he’d drunkenly whipped up at Chili’s during a de-icing delay. He wants to die of shame when he realizes that Adam has been reading over his shoulder on the flight.
I’m not sure I’ve read a fanfic that is so short and that made me laugh and snort as much as this one has in the dozen or so times I’ve read it.
I read fanfic. Like, a lot of fanfic. I also write it. This fic and its follow-up (Part 2 review coming soon) taught me so much about how to whittle and twist and infuse as much feeling as possible out of every single sentence. Even in this 1,900 word fic, these characters are so real, so flawed, and Ronan’s fever-dream internal monologue of his early morning flight with Adam is gloriously bizarre and endearing.
For this year’s CBR16 Book Bingo Reading Challenge I’m choosing albums from the 1970s that helped raise me. When I think of Ronan falling hard after a chance encounter at the airport and then immediately flopping down in a Chili’s Express, pounding a few beers, and writing unhinged porn about it, I think of Foghat’s cover of “I Just Want to Make Love to You” (1972) by Foghat. I fed this and other fantastic classic rock into my impressionable young mind via the marvel that is the second Dazed and Confused (1993) soundtrack, Even More Dazed and Confused.
