Fic: Love and Loss (Flight of the Heron)

[luzula]

I didn't plan this sequel to start with, but after I finished A Double Nature, I got to thinking that I've only written established relationship fic for Ewen and Alison, and that it might be interesting to write them falling in love when they've both loved and lost before. And indeed I really enjoyed writing this, and think it turned out well! It's interesting to compare one's feelings towards different ships: in a way, I suppose I do ship Keith/Ewen more or at least differently, since I would never write a story where they break up and then Ewen gets together with Alison. OTOH, I've written it the other way round multiple times (but Ewen and Alison breaking up was always in the backstory of the fic--I don't think I'd want to write a full version of that).

Love and Loss (12302 words) by Luzula
Fandom: The Jacobite Trilogy | The Flight of the Heron Series - D. K. Broster
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Ewen Cameron/Alison Grant, Past Ewen Cameron/Keith Windham
Characters: Ewen Cameron, Alison Grant (Jacobite Trilogy), Margaret Cameron, Hector Grant
Additional Tags: past major character death, Romance, Grief/Mourning, Courtship, Werewolves
Series: Part 2 of A Double Nature
Summary: A few years after the Rising, Ewen meets a comrade-in-arms from the Rising in Maryburgh, who is accompanied by his widowed sister.

Thanks for Garonne for beta reading!

Comments

[sanguinity]

Ooo! A sequel to Double Nature!

It's interesting to compare one's feelings towards different ships: in a way, I suppose I do ship Keith/Ewen more or at least differently, since I would never write a story where they break up and then Ewen gets together with Alison.

Some make the argument that fic exists to supply something that lacked in canon. That could explain a great part of the difference in your approach to creating stories for the two ships. I don't think it has to be a difference in your feelings about the ships themselves.

And while audience preferences are less of a factor for you than they are for me, I'd nevertheless be surprised if they had no influence whatsoever? So again, how much you write one over another (or the different kinds of stories you write for them) can be explained by things other than your personal feelings about them...

[luzula]

That could explain a great part of the difference in your approach to creating stories for the two ships.
Alison and Keith do get very different fates in canon, so yes, maybe you're right that my feelings about them partly come from that...

And while audience preferences are less of a factor for you than they are for me
Hmm, do you mean that you care more about audience preferences than me--how so?

[sanguinity]

When we've talked about audience preferences and their consequence on the likely size of a readership for a story, I've had the impression that I get more easily demoralized about that than you do. Did that tally with your impression, or did it seem otherwise to you?