traditional fic-writing: fluff. smut. coffeeshops. missing episodes. original characters. cross-genre AUs.
traditional copingfic: major archive warnings. graphic torture. crises of faith. mental illness. long tangents on the fundamental injustice of reality.
me writing fic: major archive warnings. graphic torture. crises of faith. mental illness. long tangents on the fundamental injustice of reality.
me writing copingfic: it’s original fiction about detectives for some reason
My mother, may G-d bless her because He certainly hasn’t given her much to work with so far, named me Sidney Solomon Jacobi. I got the name Shiv when I was twelve and dissuaded a number of my goyishe peers who endeavored to make sure I was properly circumcised before I became a man. Of such idyllic tales is childhood made.
It was an improvement over my previous nickname, Sid the Rat, which is what people call anyone born scrawnier than average with enough nose to stick it everywhere. For one thing, “the Rat” is not intimidating to anyone who has never read up on the Black Plague, or who generally has enough to eat and therefore no compelling reason to fight a rat and find out what happens when the bite subsequently gets infected, which it will. “Shiv” tends to give those familiar with the meaning pause, and gives one the opportunity to provide the remainder with educational anecdotes liable to give them even greater pause. For another thing, I stopped getting confused with all the other Rats out there, which was surely a relief to us all.
I developed a tendency to stick my nose in things because growing up poor and Jewish in Chicago, or really anywhere else, you don’t grow up if you don’t find out everything you can about everything there is to know, and there wasn’t nobody going to tell anything to some punk kid who always found some new way to disappoint his mother. By the time I knew enough law to get my accreditation, raising and dashing her hopes yet again, the detective’s license was little more than a formality. I already had a network of contacts stretching from Lincoln Square to 87th, Cicero to the harbor, many of whom owed me favours, and the rest of whom I could make life very inconvenient for if given a reason. My mother decries this as lashon hara. I tell her that only counts for gossip that’s no help to anybody, which means what I do is a damned sight better than her own pursuits, at which she pivots to asking why I don’t charge people more if what I do is so helpful then and what is the world coming to when children no longer care about their parents’ comfort. I don’t talk to her much.If you like this, might I tempt you in the direction of an entire chapter of similar material narrated by Shiv’s partner?
(No outside knowledge is required – it is on AO3 as an original work written in a fandom context.)
This had been — along with the kinds of people I do talk to, my poor romantic prospects, the ache in her own stony breast for another generation of grandchildren to nurture into fine young alcoholics, and the accomplishments of my more upstanding and less sufferable peers — the subject of our most recent conversation. It was a little less than a week after the Christian New Year, a little less than two before I’d have to hear my mother’s voice again, and nobody was feeling too happy about either one. In my case, this was because I am morally opposed to matricide. In the case of many others, whose moral stances regarding matricide I am not qualified to remark upon, this was because the dragnet government raids of the past few months had recently resulted in over a hundred arrests of, reportedly, anyone who happened to be in or near the building in question during the local Communist chapter’s weekly kaffeeklatsch. In the case of my client, Mrs. Liese Dittmar, 39, of 1526 South Homan Avenue, this was more specifically because her husband Oscar had been attending a union meeting on the evening of that same raid, and had not been seen or heard from since.My usual police contact shut me out, and made it clear that further inquiries regarding the recent raids would be met with significantly more pressing inquiries in the opposite direction. My contact in the forensics department, who was nicer, told me that whatever was going on, it wasn’t going through him, but he’d check around with the hospitals and morgues to rule out alternate causes of disappearance. My records request at the courthouse was met with a rote apology that all records related to this week’s raids were sealed from public view. My acquaintance at the Chicago Daily News told me that officialdom at large was doing everything in its power to keep information on the raids from getting out. I told her I’d sort of noticed. She told me that if I didn’t need to hear what she had to say then maybe I should stop calling her when she had deadlines to meet. I pointed out that I didn’t know she didn’t have anything to tell me until I’d asked. She hung up on me at that point.
I should probably introduce my partner at this juncture.