Baffling!

[krait]

I was just browsing AO3, as you do, when I ran across a fic with the most baffling tag.

After CNTW, two iterations of the same pairing, four characters, "Hurt/Comfort," and a pairing smushname, the tag list ends with "You may want to skip the last chapter."

The fic's only rated M, the summary sounds like a meet-cute AU romance, and there's absolutely no other clues. So........

What FOR???? o.O

I'll be skipping all the chapters, but I'm thoroughly baffled.

Comments

[azurelunatic]

*throws self on literary grenade*

So (from skimming the last 2 chapters) the "hurt" is cancer, the "comfort" is finding love, and the penultimate chapter is where the story would have ended, as the cancer patient finally meets a good benchmark and they get to have glorious unprotected sex. Happily ever afte--

Final chapter is not fully written out like the rest, it's short snippets (which the chapter note mentions). They get married a year later! 5 years after that? Cancer's back. He's ded.

[sholio]

LOLLLLL. "One of the pairing dies" would definitely have been my guess, but that's even more depressing and pointlessly WTF than the various things I was imagining. (Not that I even know what fandom this is.)

[krait]

Ehhh. It's pretending to be Tolkien fandom, but it's really Worst Peter Jackson Movies Fandom. Sometimes I get a craving for Elf/Human romance and go fishing in the busier end of the pond...

From azurelunatic's description it's pretty clearly an untagged modern!AU; it's probably a human!AU too, which is doubly disappointing when I was browsing an interspecies pairing tag with 'Modern AU' excluded. D:

[krait]

Okay, so... character death. Why not just tag the character death, instead of CNTW and vagueing about it? I remain bewildered, but am now disappointed on top of that.

I was hoping for something truly wacko! "Ah, there are no archive warnings for 'surprise, his husband was a zombie all along!' but I want to make people try to guess," perhaps.

[azurelunatic]

It wasn't even GOOD character death.