Cornerstone Characterisation
A collection of fics that get a character so right that I would recommend them to somebody who has never encountered the source material as a guide to understanding that character. Frequently these works have given me new headcanons simply because their characterisation is good enough that it not only follows canon, but enhances it.
(Open, Moderated)
Random works
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You Taste Like Suburbia by CannibalGender
Fandoms: Interview with the Vampire (TV 2022), Anne Rice's Talamasca: The Secret Order (TV 2025)
08 May 2026
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“We aren’t together anymore,” he says. He does not ask if she overheard, simply arches his brows, waits for her to speak. “I only wanted to observe.”
“Mhmm. Fuck you,” she says, halfheartedly. “Observe what, us?”
“I wanted to see him where he belongs. Among his…peers, you could say.”
“With me? With the girls? He doesn’t belong to me. I wouldn’t want him to. He doesn’t even belong with me. As far as I’m concerned, you can have him.”
Armand, looking less the boy than ever now, narrows his eyes just slightly. He studies her like a stray animal trying to figure out how to open a garbage can: if he can just understand, he can feast. “Why? You love him.”OR:
Armand, famously normal about his partners' families, haunts the Molloys. -
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Allison and Klaus get ready together before the Wedding At The End Of The World.
(Please note this fic deals with some dark topics but it's all mostly alluded to rather than actively happening. This is NOT an Allison bashing fic, but it doesn't shy away from her unacceptable actions regarding consent either.)
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a girl is a house of mirrors by This_world_of_beautiful_monsters
Fandoms: Avatar (Cameron Movies), James Cameron's Avatar - All Media Types
19 Mar 2023
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Every child struggles to figure out who they are. Kiri would settle for being sure of who she's not.
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Imagine a boot. Imagine the leather and laces, the stink of mud clinging to its sole. Imagine pressing it against their faces. You know who. You don’t have to imagine them. They always exist. Imagine the softness of their cheeks against your heel. Imagine the mud rubbed in their eyes. Imagine how they whimper. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.
Imagine showing them how sorry they are.
In the void between worlds, there's not much to do besides fall and think. Loki does plenty of both.
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One day, Matt Murdock saves an old man. The old man does not completely succeed in saving Matt Murdock.
Random bookmarks
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Mexico City, 1942. The bell falls but, instead of waking up in the Land of the Dead, Ernesto de la Cruz finds himself with a broken spine - and an unwanted guest at his bedside who claims he can let him have the sweet release of death, if he gives back what he took from him.
And, in 1947, Coco receives a letter...[Art based on this fic can be found here]
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Bookmarked by mayfriend
26 Jul 2022
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When her papá comes home, Coco is asleep on the windowsill.
She snuck to the window in the middle of the night, as she does most nights, to wait for her papá. She doesn’t know how much time she’s spent straining her eyes in the dark, hoping to see him suddenly step out of the shadows and under the light of the moon, smiling, with the guitar in his hands to sing her their secret song. She often hums it very quietly as she stares out of the window, hoping that it will bring him home.
But it never did so far and always, without fail, she falls asleep well before dawn despite her best efforts to stay awake. Always, she awakens in the morning in her mother’s bed, in her embrace. And each time, her mother doesn’t say a word - like she hasn’t found her asleep at the window, and taken her to bed. She will comfort her, but never talk about it.
Coco suspects it hurts her mamá even more than it hurts her, but she doesn’t know how to help. All that she knows is that everything will be better when papá comes home, so she keeps waiting by the window - and this time, she doesn’t awaken in her mamá bed. When her eyes snap open she’s still there, the world outside still dark, and the door is rattling. She almost shrieks, but then a voice rings out on the other side, and it’s a voice she knows.
“Coco, plase! I’m so sorry! I wanted to come back!”
“Papá!”
There is joy, but there’s also fear. Her papá is crying out, his voice thin and frightened, like he’s trying to get away from something dangerous out there in the dark. She can’t see him from the window, can’t see anything, and the door rattles again. He’s trying to get in and can’t, he’s locked outside and calling out for her to let him in.
“Coco! Let me come home!”
She tries to open the door to let her papá in, but she can’t: she’s too small and the door’s handle is too high up, it shakes and rattles just above her reach. “I can’t reach!” she cries out, and turns to grab a chair to climb on, or call for her mamá and her uncles, or both - but the room is gone, the house is gone, and around her there is nothing but darkness.
She takes a step back, shrieking for her papá to come in, come in right now, and that is when the door stops rattling… and finally, slowly, creaks open.
Moonlight spills on her, and there is a moment of relief, the simple certainty that all is going to be well - but when she turns, it’s not her papá she sees. Before her face, there is a grinning skull with a golden tooth; it takes her a moment to recognize it as his guitar.
But her papá is not the one holding it. She can only see his shadow, but it’s slightly too short and much too broad. She knows who it belongs to. “...Tío Neto? Where’s papá?”
A few moments of silence, and then Ernesto de la Cruz - who’s not really her tío but may very well be, her papá always said he’s his hermano in all but blood - sinks on one knee, one hand still holding the guitar. With the other, he’s handing her a songbook with a red cover that seems to be dripping color, turning his hand just as red.
“He’s never coming home, Coco. Take this back.”
She doesn’t want that dripping songbook, she wants her papá and she wants to scream as much, but words stay stuck in her throat. In the end, she just starts crying.
“You took our song,” she chokes out.
“Lo siento.”
“I want him back. Where is he?”
Ernesto bows his head, and says nothing. Something red drips from his hands and from the eyes of the skull guitar, like it’s weeping along with her. Somewhere outside a train whistles, pulling into the station, and Coco knows that her papá never caught it.
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Klaus shrugs. "You know me, try anything once. Well, sometimes twice, but that's only if there's room for error, and I think-"
"I don't."
Klaus actually looks at Ben for that. "Hm?"
"I don't know you," Ben says. "I don't know anything about you."
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Bookmarked by mayfriend
28 Jun 2022
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"I love you," Klaus says.
"No you don't."
"I do. I never told you that enough."
"You're still not telling me." Ben opens his eyes again. Klaus's are open, too, as flat and green as the pool table. "I'm not the person you love.”
“You could be.”
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After several reconstructive surgeries, Orc struggles to adjust to his life after the FAYZ.
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Bookmarked by mayfriend
03 Aug 2021
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Occasionally, he had dreams about Howard. They were always the same. Howard would be trying to open a vending machine with a crowbar, like Cookie and some others in his old gang had tried at the beginning of the FAYZ, when Orc was still captain. Howard would be trying and failing to break it open, cursing and sweating. He’d ask Orc for help, but he was stuck to the tile floor of the convenience store.
“Come on, man,” Howard yelled every time. “Help me, or the other kids will get to it.”
“You’re dead,” Orc would say—or try to say. His tongue was thick and slow in his mouth. All he could do was watch, unable to speak, as Howard struggled and struggled. Finally, he’d smash the vending machine window, and the shards would scatter everywhere. Orc would wake up, panting and sweating, his heart racing.
He had gotten out of the hospital too late to go to Howard’s funeral. Mr. and Mrs. Bassem had a private thing set up, only for family, his mom told him.
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Solaria's only ambition is to live, for herself; and she's not going to let a girl that calls her Foxface stand in her way.
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- English
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- 12,916
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Bookmarked by mayfriend
01 May 2018
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"I know that nothing is fair," she begins. "I know that this whole contest is meant to be a punishment. But can you really let them get away with that? Cato and Clove have each other, Katniss and Peeta have each other..." She lowers her eyes in entirely fake sorrow and contrition. "And so you relegate the ones that could have been your victors, not their own. Katniss the ice maiden will never be yours. Peeta the humble son of the earth will never be yours. Cato and Clove will own their own triumph if they can make it."
She blinks tears into her eyes and looks up at the camera again. "It's in your hands now. We all know the Gamemakers interfere with the Games at their whim, but how are your bets looking now, which you placed in good faith that the rules would be as they always are?" And then she plays the line that people have used against her so many times, when she chafed against the confines that held her in her place. "If you let them get away with this, what might they think of next? Is nothing sacrosanct? Is nothing stable, nothing reliable, nothing unchangeable?"
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Now, at eighteen, he swears to himself this will be the time. If he waits any longer, the clock will signal the end of their youth, the beginning of something new. In that upheaval, Jung Hwan isn’t sure if love will manage to fit in.
During the winter of nineteen eighty-eight, amidst a torturous Secret Santa gift exchange and the end of their youth, Jung Hwan comes to terms with himself and his relationships.
Series
- Part 1 of 소확행 (sohwakhaeng)
Bookmarked by mayfriend
04 Mar 2025
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Jung Hwan waits.
He’s good at waiting. Every major moment in his life is a breath of relief before there is another period of waiting, and he works hard during them to get to the next. The last few years, there’s been more waiting than there normally is. He listens to Taek winning on the radio and the hosts exploding into cheers, whereas he—one of only the people who knows that Taek takes a cocktail of different sleeping pills to drift into unconsciousness—has to wait for him to come back, and even then, Jung Hwan manages only a half-hug before starting to feel dirty. He pores over his maths notes with Sun Woo in a comfortable silence and a friendly rivalry before they wait for the next exam, and then they wait for the results. He wakes up early and he waits outside the gate for Deok Sun to roll up, yawning and clutching her backpack, mouth pulling up in a half-smile when she sees Jung Hwan standing there.
He feels he’s been waiting for childhood to be over for a long time.
Jung Hwan realises it only when he looks in the mirror and takes stock of his face. The eyes he’d inherited from his mother, the mouth that he purses so much that wrinkles form around the edges of it. He realises it only when he glances at his friends and suddenly sees the people they’ve grown into, not the kids he’s grown up with. This is the year, in the end. After this one, they’ll go their own ways. They’ll come back, of course, to visit their families and eat ramyeon in Taek’s room. But life goes on, and they’ll meet other people. Ssangmun-dong, the alley that connected them like destiny itself, will become a memory. A photo they pull out to look at every so often before it fades, like everything does.
He waits for a lot of things. He waited for his hyung after every operation, leg bouncing up and down in the hallway of the hospital, clinical and cold, just so he could see him open his eyes and smile again. He waited to become rich, promising himself that he’ll go to university and get a good job and buy his parents a nice apartment with heating so that they’ll never shiver during their sleep again. When they won the lottery, he stopped waiting for that. He waits to finish school so that he can become everything his hyung wants to be but never could because of his heart. He waits for Deok Sun every morning so they can catch the bus to school together, for Sun Woo every night so they can walk back home from the study room together, for Dong Ryong every weekend so they can sleep in the same bed when he wants to escape the oppressive clutches of the Dean.
Jung Hwan waits for Taek, every time.