Footprints in the Dust

[nell65]

One of the upsides of closed canon universes is the limitless possibilities for what our beloved characters might do next, good and ill. Happy and sad. Beautiful and tragic.

Many, many years ago, in the first heady explosion of HEA post-series LFN fanfic, some of us with a snarkier bent complained that there was an overabundence of Michael and Nikita have twins and ponies and sparkly rainbows sorts of fic, in worlds that weren't obviously supposed to be even a little AU.

Now, it's true that I'm not in a position to cast too many stones, having produced my own HEA fic, but still. Some of those first HEA, kitchen-curtian stories were a teensy bit, well, twee. Especialy given the source material. So I foolishly declared to my fellow snarkers that I could write a 'true to the source' future fic where Michael and Nikita had children and struggled to deal with parenthood in the same universe that produced Section One, and made them who they were.

Eventually - I finished the promised story. It has had lots of inputs, and still has kitchen-curtain bits, but that was probably inevitable given the challenge I originally set myself.

After nurturing it and setting it aside and picking it up again after years of languishing and then letting it mature and reading it again, I am at last letting it go into a world that has almost no readers left for this sort of story! But - in general, witness the Eureka/Hawaii 5-O story I just completed, the idea of clearing my brain of old stories has been successful. And this one is more than ready to fly on its own.

If anyone should be interested after all these years, here it is.

As always, special thanks to my excellent and wonderful beta readers sk and Jaybee. I would never have finished without you. And whatever errors and infelicities remain, they are my own.

Title: Footprints in the Dust
Fandom: LFN
Characters: Michael Samuelle, Nikita Wirth, Kate Quinn, Mick Schotpel, Adam Samuelle, OCs
Relationships: Het, Multi
Words: ~54,000

Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6

Comments

[madamedarque.livejournal.com]

Oooh, I am so excited to read this when I get the chance! It's always wonderful to see a WIP completed--congratulations!

How are you, by the way? I miss our LFN conversations. ;)

[nell65.livejournal.com]

I'm good - busy, work, life, kids, etc.... but writing fiction again, which feels good. And yes, completing an ancient WIP is very satisfying. It's actually been mostly done for a long time, but the posting is the end stage, yeah? *g*

How are you these days?

(And yes, I miss fandom chatter as well, finally have the time and the cable to be following some new fandoms, which is nice. Though I'm so old skool that I'm quite flumoxed by fandom on twitter and tumblr, so, well, I most stay away from those parts.....!)

[sk56.livejournal.com]

"Though I'm so old skool that I'm quite flumoxed by fandom on twitter and tumblr, so, well, I most stay away from those parts.....!"

I'm afraid I'm even older school than you...

I'm so glad that you've posted this -- I really fell behind on my commenting, and I'm thrilled that you forged ahead!

[nell65.livejournal.com]

Thanks - it feels - satisfying - to have it out there. :-)

[jaybee65.livejournal.com]

I enjoy both Twitter and Tumblr, but not for fandom. I'm not entirely sure why, to be honest. Twitter does actually work for conversation, as I've used it successfully for discussions of all sorts of political topics, and Tumblr is great for visual art/news photographs. But for whatever reason, the fandom-related discourse in both of those places is really, really annoying.

[madamedarque.livejournal.com]

But for whatever reason, the fandom-related discourse in both of those places is really, really annoying.

I agree--I'm spending most of my fannish time on Tumblr now, and it's extraordinarily awkward to have a simple conversation with someone! It's as if the Tumblrbots attempted to make it as technically difficult as possible to do so; the reply/reblog/comment features are always changing, and it's borderline impossible to find where conversations began through the chain of reblogs. Twitter is similarly somewhat technically byzantine and certainly not conducive to in-depth discussion. I haven't yet found a platform to match the ease with which LJ facilitates fannish conversation, I admit.

[nell65.livejournal.com]

Friends have told me the only way to understand twitter is just to start using it.... and certainly during the riots in Merida while I was there, I followed the whole thing on twitter - it was teh only way to figure out what was happening - but I did it using the twitter webpage.

I've followed links to tumblr, of course, and yeah - it does look good for pictures. lj is actually still quite irritataing that way, in that your picture still has to be up on the web someplace else.

But - I struggle to keep up where I am already intersted...inviting new ways to loose time on the internet seems, well, reckless! lol!

[sk56.livejournal.com]

"inviting new ways to loose time on the internet seems, well, reckless! lol! "

Absolutely!

[madamedarque.livejournal.com]

I'm doing well IRL--school, mostly. I admit that I've mostly migrated to tumblr, but I'm still checking LJ regularly. For all its shortcomings, I haven't found another place as conducive to long-form fannish discussions. (Tumblr is notoriously awkward for facilitating back-and-forth conversations, and the fandom etiquette is strange--reblog? reply? I once received a semi-irate message asking that I not reblog our conversation. Er, oh dear.)

What are your fandoms nowadays?

[nell65.livejournal.com]

I follow fanfic for about a half dozen fandoms, give or take? Once Upon A Time, Haven, Being Human (Canada/US), Eureka and Hawaii 5-0, of course.

Discussions? Really only those that appear here in lj, on my very short friends list. I still *love* a good fannish discussion.... but rather than finding new like minded fans, I'm afraid I've stuck with my old like minded lj friend/fans - all dating back to LFN! - and engage when we find a new common fandom.

[jaybee65.livejournal.com]

This is such a terrific story - I'm amazed that you took all those elements and made it into something not only plausible but actually *right*!

[nell65.livejournal.com]

well - in the long sense, I wrote it for you (!) so I'm glad you enjoyed the final result, and that it did meet the tests of plausible and *right*!

In some ways, honestly, I think the hardest part was finding a plausible way for them to be out long enought to have (any!) children... after that, bringing everyone back 'in' was, well, impossible NOT to do in the context of the story environment. ;-)