balsamandash | (no subject)

Things I've been keeping myself mentally busy with at work this week:

> Elaborate White Collar/Practical Magic fic where Elizabeth and Neal are Owens siblings, Peter is oblivious to both the magic and the sibling parts, and I have a lot of fun seeing how close I can stick to S1/S2 canon as I play with this clearly not canon premise

> Elaborate White Collar fic where El and Peter both have screwed up childhoods and really bad relationship role models, and somehow manage to slowly piece together a good life (or, one possible explanation for the logic behind "We're not like other couples; we work".)

> Elaborately sorting my OCs via the Sorting Hat Chats system. Seriously, it's ridiculously fun to figure out and I can't stop doing it. (I have a Hufflepuff/Slytherin-primaries problem, for the record.)

(Reasons I have had to focus on elaborate things this week: My mental health is completely in the trash the last couple of nights, to the point of being near non-verbal and on the edge of breakdowns. It's. I'm dealing with it. I'm not dealing well. But I'm dealing with it. Mostly by distractions. See above.)

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*HUGS*

For the record I kind of want to hear all about the Practical Magic one because that sounds amazing.

*many, many, many hugs*

I partially blame the fact that there are a couple of "Neal and Elizabeth are siblings" prompts floating around the White Collar kink meme and I've always been kind of sad I can't find a good fic for it? I largely blame the fact that I've been marathoning Peter/Elizabeth/Neal fic, with some Peter/Elizabeth in there as well, and there is a surprising amount of it that has a fixation on Peter's strength, both physical and otherwise. So I, having started rewatching S1 directly after Practical Magic, start drawing weird connections. Like you do.

So Elizabeth and Neal's mother is an Owens who's pretty much ignored her magic for most of her life, and ignored her family because of it; she hasn't hid from them or anything but she doesn't reach out. They both embrace their magic very quietly, though; El's is more powerful, and Neal's is more precise. (Also Neal is like. the first Owens boy with magic in decades and no one knows what to do with this fact or what it means.)

They grow up basically in each other's pockets, and then Stuff Happens and Neal runs off and gets caught up in a life of crime and enjoying the hell out of himself; and Elizabeth runs off to New York and gets involved in art and magic and they keep in close touch but don't see each other very much. And then El meets Peter; and Neal is incredibly curious about this guy that his sister is completely wrapped up in and giddy over and who she keeps going back and forth about worrying that she'll be the end of and wondering if maybe he can survive the curse. So he kind of... angles his life towards them; not interfering, because at this point the worlds they've built themselves are pretty seperate and they're more or less okay with not intruding on each other's lives directly, but he comes to New York to watch both of them from afar. And then crime happens and it's not so much from afar as over his shoulder.

... and then there is canon, with Neal and Elizabeth doing a lot more silently communicating over everyone else's heads than in the show but otherwise things being the same. XD I mean, there's probably more to it than that, but that's the very rough outline in my head. Most of what I've specifically got are scenes.

This is amazing and I love everything about it. Especially imagining Peter's face once he finally figures it out.

I think that Elizabeth and Neal would make excellent Owens siblings.

Yay! :) I do too. I've wanted Elizabeth as an Owens, or some kind of magical thing, for forever anyway, so.