Author profile: nifra_idril
Author: nifra_idril
Website/link to fic: Neon Nights
Fanlore page: nifra_idril's fanlore wiki page
First DS fic posted: 2004
Full disclosure: Nifra drifted away from fandom a few years ago, but she was the person who first pimped me into Due South (back in my fannish babyhood before I'd seen the show or even realized there were two Rays), so she seemed the obvious choice for my first ds_profiles entry. Also, we beta'd for each other several times way back when.
Pairings: primarily FK, also some great gennish character pieces.
Style and strengths: Nifra's stories are full of poetic constructions, vivid detail, and musical sensibility. I could get happily lost in her word choice and the flow of her sentences, even while an economy of words keeps her stories mostly around flashfic length. Her character voices are dead-on, and her RayK is wonderfully matter-of-fact. The way she writes yearning between people is, for me, palpable and delicious. Also, she has several excellent stories written through the eyes of a third party, most notably Sad Songs and Waltzes, a beautiful flashfic where young!Ben observes and begins to understand the relationship between his grandparents.
Other DS/C6D activity: a Wilby Wonderful story called You're Going to Rise Up Singing, wherein Dan discovers the Watch and the ending reverses a common Duck/Dan!trope in a lovely way.
Some favorites: (ordered chronologically)
• A Kingdom Filled with Snow is a fairytale where Fraser is the son of the Snow King and I love it beyond textual rendering.
After a time, the prince found himself ensorcelled by a cruel temptress, who he had loved once before in his home, among the bright drifts of snow, and the knife-sharp sky. She had returned to him, speaking words of love, but with hatred in her heart. For her, the prince would have given up even his love of justice, his life, everything. She wove a terrible spell round him, and would have killed him, if not for the quick mind of the prince's new brother. His life was saved, but the young prince was heart sick, and could no longer stand the deep longing he felt for his home. He bade his friend a farewell, and left for a brief time, wanting only to feel the beautiful cold of his childhood, and see the land that had raised him, the land his father the king had so loved.
• Grooving Up Slowly. It's been years, obviously, but if I remember correctly, Nifra & I talked about our love for trip hop (Massive Attack, Morcheeba, Portishead, etc.) at least once, and (again, iirc) the title of this fic is riffing on Massive Attack's Inertia as much as the Beatles' "Come Together". Point is, listen to the Massive Attack song; it describes what the rhythm of this story does and how it does it. ♥
At two a.m. on Wednesday, Ray's feeling rational. Well, maybe not rational, because he's having a fake love affair with a real Canadian who's got a kind of wolf, and it's all happening in his head, but he's thinking things out.
Making plans, which he probably won't ever act on, seeing how Fraser's Ray's best friend, and Ray's not in any kind of position to start making sudden drastic changes in his lifestyle seeing as how his lifestyle isn't really technically *his* anymore.
But he's thinking things like, "Maybe if I asked him out to dinner, maybe I touched his thigh under the table, saw what happened, and then went from there then maybe - "
• Voices Prophetic and Patient - a crossover with Neil Gaiman's Sandman series. Fraser meets Dream. My inner comics!fangirl's heart swells with joy just because the crossover exists, but the story itself is eerie and wonderful and eerily wonderful, and it's entirely accessible even if you don't know Sandman. Much beloved.
"This is the forest primeval," Fraser whispers, as he stares up at the dark pines that tower over him and cast purple shadows across the snow. He is barefoot, but he doesn't feel the cold.
"Yes," the man beside him says, "it is."
The trees grow tall enough to blot out the moon, and Fraser's eyes travel along branches that seem to twine like fingers overhead. Pine needles shiver down, and fall all around Fraser, making patterns by his feet.
Fraser slants a look at his companion who is tall, with skin the same color as the snow and eyes of unrelieved dark that somehow seem to gleam.
"I know that I'm dying," he states. Here the words sound small and unimportant, because the forest spreads out silent, endless.
• Watershed is on lots of rec lists and I include it here because 1. it's great, and 2. it's the longest of Nifra's DS fic. It's the same wondrous build of momentum as her other stories, only longer and more intense, and the ending knocks your socks clean off.
Ray wakes up in the middle of the night, fucking *scared* - heart pounding, palms sweating, whole deal. He doesn't remember what he was dreaming, not really, except maybe there were giraffes and a lot of red swirling things, and Fraser was there. But beyond that, he's got nothing, and he can't shake the fear and yeah, okay, there's about ten stitches across his thigh and a lump the size of a frickin' baseball on his forehead, but that's to be expected.
• Nothing is possibly my favorite of all stories about the end of Stella and RayK's marriage. It's unflinchingly realistic and as character-positive as all Nifra's fic, which is extremely. There's no dissing Ray or Stella for being who they are: the simple fact is life happens and neither partner is necessarily more at fault for the consequences than the other. Also, I love Nifra's Stella so very much.
"You look so different," he said, voice flat.
He sat in the shadows - all she could see was his mouth, the tips of his ears and his hand as he reached toward her. "Sometimes I wake up, and Stell - you look so different.”
She knows what he means. Sometimes she comes home and sees him standing in their kitchen, badge silver at his hip and dark straps of his holster criss-crossing over his back, face folded as he frowns at a file on the counter top and drinks his coffee, and thinks, "Who the hell is this guy and where’s Ray Kowalski?"
• (bonus rec: this is beyond DS fandom, but if you want to dig a little deeper I strongly recommend Waste Our Lights In Vain (Shakespeare; Mercutio/Tybalt, Mercutio/Romeo), written for Yuletide 2004.)
Website/link to fic: Neon Nights
Fanlore page: nifra_idril's fanlore wiki page
First DS fic posted: 2004
Full disclosure: Nifra drifted away from fandom a few years ago, but she was the person who first pimped me into Due South (back in my fannish babyhood before I'd seen the show or even realized there were two Rays), so she seemed the obvious choice for my first ds_profiles entry. Also, we beta'd for each other several times way back when.
Pairings: primarily FK, also some great gennish character pieces.
Style and strengths: Nifra's stories are full of poetic constructions, vivid detail, and musical sensibility. I could get happily lost in her word choice and the flow of her sentences, even while an economy of words keeps her stories mostly around flashfic length. Her character voices are dead-on, and her RayK is wonderfully matter-of-fact. The way she writes yearning between people is, for me, palpable and delicious. Also, she has several excellent stories written through the eyes of a third party, most notably Sad Songs and Waltzes, a beautiful flashfic where young!Ben observes and begins to understand the relationship between his grandparents.
Other DS/C6D activity: a Wilby Wonderful story called You're Going to Rise Up Singing, wherein Dan discovers the Watch and the ending reverses a common Duck/Dan!trope in a lovely way.
Some favorites: (ordered chronologically)
• A Kingdom Filled with Snow is a fairytale where Fraser is the son of the Snow King and I love it beyond textual rendering.
After a time, the prince found himself ensorcelled by a cruel temptress, who he had loved once before in his home, among the bright drifts of snow, and the knife-sharp sky. She had returned to him, speaking words of love, but with hatred in her heart. For her, the prince would have given up even his love of justice, his life, everything. She wove a terrible spell round him, and would have killed him, if not for the quick mind of the prince's new brother. His life was saved, but the young prince was heart sick, and could no longer stand the deep longing he felt for his home. He bade his friend a farewell, and left for a brief time, wanting only to feel the beautiful cold of his childhood, and see the land that had raised him, the land his father the king had so loved.
• Grooving Up Slowly. It's been years, obviously, but if I remember correctly, Nifra & I talked about our love for trip hop (Massive Attack, Morcheeba, Portishead, etc.) at least once, and (again, iirc) the title of this fic is riffing on Massive Attack's Inertia as much as the Beatles' "Come Together". Point is, listen to the Massive Attack song; it describes what the rhythm of this story does and how it does it. ♥
At two a.m. on Wednesday, Ray's feeling rational. Well, maybe not rational, because he's having a fake love affair with a real Canadian who's got a kind of wolf, and it's all happening in his head, but he's thinking things out.
Making plans, which he probably won't ever act on, seeing how Fraser's Ray's best friend, and Ray's not in any kind of position to start making sudden drastic changes in his lifestyle seeing as how his lifestyle isn't really technically *his* anymore.
But he's thinking things like, "Maybe if I asked him out to dinner, maybe I touched his thigh under the table, saw what happened, and then went from there then maybe - "
• Voices Prophetic and Patient - a crossover with Neil Gaiman's Sandman series. Fraser meets Dream. My inner comics!fangirl's heart swells with joy just because the crossover exists, but the story itself is eerie and wonderful and eerily wonderful, and it's entirely accessible even if you don't know Sandman. Much beloved.
"This is the forest primeval," Fraser whispers, as he stares up at the dark pines that tower over him and cast purple shadows across the snow. He is barefoot, but he doesn't feel the cold.
"Yes," the man beside him says, "it is."
The trees grow tall enough to blot out the moon, and Fraser's eyes travel along branches that seem to twine like fingers overhead. Pine needles shiver down, and fall all around Fraser, making patterns by his feet.
Fraser slants a look at his companion who is tall, with skin the same color as the snow and eyes of unrelieved dark that somehow seem to gleam.
"I know that I'm dying," he states. Here the words sound small and unimportant, because the forest spreads out silent, endless.
• Watershed is on lots of rec lists and I include it here because 1. it's great, and 2. it's the longest of Nifra's DS fic. It's the same wondrous build of momentum as her other stories, only longer and more intense, and the ending knocks your socks clean off.
Ray wakes up in the middle of the night, fucking *scared* - heart pounding, palms sweating, whole deal. He doesn't remember what he was dreaming, not really, except maybe there were giraffes and a lot of red swirling things, and Fraser was there. But beyond that, he's got nothing, and he can't shake the fear and yeah, okay, there's about ten stitches across his thigh and a lump the size of a frickin' baseball on his forehead, but that's to be expected.
• Nothing is possibly my favorite of all stories about the end of Stella and RayK's marriage. It's unflinchingly realistic and as character-positive as all Nifra's fic, which is extremely. There's no dissing Ray or Stella for being who they are: the simple fact is life happens and neither partner is necessarily more at fault for the consequences than the other. Also, I love Nifra's Stella so very much.
"You look so different," he said, voice flat.
He sat in the shadows - all she could see was his mouth, the tips of his ears and his hand as he reached toward her. "Sometimes I wake up, and Stell - you look so different.”
She knows what he means. Sometimes she comes home and sees him standing in their kitchen, badge silver at his hip and dark straps of his holster criss-crossing over his back, face folded as he frowns at a file on the counter top and drinks his coffee, and thinks, "Who the hell is this guy and where’s Ray Kowalski?"
• (bonus rec: this is beyond DS fandom, but if you want to dig a little deeper I strongly recommend Waste Our Lights In Vain (Shakespeare; Mercutio/Tybalt, Mercutio/Romeo), written for Yuletide 2004.)