Crossworks 2025

[teratornis]

Back on the exchange rounds, I participated in this year's Crossworks exchange, and had a great time with it.

I don't believe it happened last year, so I was unfamiliar with it until this year, but I was excited to learn about it. Crossovers and fusions allow for such cool possibilities. Especially when it comes to the sci-fi/fantasy/supernatural sort of stuff I tend to enjoy, the worldbuilding alone is great to explore. And there's always the fun that comes with throwing characters from separate canons at each other and seeing where that goes, both in terms of character interactions and how each reacts to the problems inherent in other settings. There's a lot of great stuff to be explored with crossovers.

I went. . . a little over the top with signups. I requested somewhere around maybe 30 fandoms, in various potential configurations, and offered on around that many again. I don't know the actual count, it's a lot.

I was pretty thrilled with the assignment I ended up getting, and with the gift.

The Weight of Knowledge (10942 words) by Teratornis
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Listener (TV), Stargate SG-1
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Toby Logan & Michelle McCluskey, Sam Carter & Daniel Jackson & Jack O'Neill & Teal'c
Characters: Michelle McCluskey, Toby Logan, Jack O'Neill (Stargate), Sam Carter (Stargate), Daniel Jackson (Stargate), Teal'c (Stargate), Original Characters
Additional Tags: Goa'uld (Stargate), Canon-Typical Violence, Minor Character Death, Secrets, Case Fic lite, Fuzzy Timeline
Summary: A thief Michelle and Toby are trying to catch proves to be far more dangerous than either of them could have anticipated and escapes their custody. When they're joined by a military team from the United States, also determined to stop the thief, they find themselves caught up in a threat they're badly unprepared to face.

I'm a fairly new fan of The Listener, I watched it at argentum_ls' suggestion a while back, and became very fond of it very quickly. There were points where it didn't really reach its full potential, but the characters and worldbuilding are all pretty compelling. That, and it's an incredibly easy canon to combine with other things, and I had a whole pile of ideas about that before even getting my assignment.

Stargate, on the other hand, I've been a fan of for a very long time. I haven't done a lot of writing for it mostly because it's such an extensive canon, it's difficult to focus in on any one part sometimes, and especially to dig around and find specific episodes unless you know exactly where in canon it falls.

Fortunately, in this case, I didn't need much in the way of specifics, and I had a grand time doing some general canon review. It's been a while since I've watched any Stargate, and I had honestly forgotten just how fun it is. Also managed to pinpoint a few of my favorite episodes, so who knows, maybe I'll delve back in for additional fanfic purposes at some point.

In any case, there were some great options with this story. Throwing Toby's mind-reading abilities in with malicious near-immortal aliens was just plain fun, and the story sort of. . . just kept growing, once I started writing. I figured it was going to get a bit lengthy, when I began, but I wasn't anticipating it to grow quite the way it did.

Still, it was lots of fun. I don't have real plans for a follow-up of some kind, but y'know, it could be fun to revisit

The gift for me was also great fun. It's Highlander, which is of course always a fave fandom, and Elementary, which I greatly enjoy and as a result of this fic am now rewatching.

All Powerless to Unfold the Future (3409 words) by skieswideopen
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Elementary (TV), Highlander: The Series
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Sherlock Holmes, Methos (Highlander)
Additional Tags: Old Friends, Secrets, Explosions
Summary: Little secrets like immortality are hard to keep in emergencies.

This is definitely a great example of the whole throwing two characters at each other and seeing what falls out sort of crossover, and I really enjoyed it. Putting Methos in a room with this version of Sherlock Holmes is a hoot, especially given the history the writer sketched in between the two of them. It's a fun immortality-reveal story that I quite enjoyed, and equally fun to speculate on the story beyond the story, as it were. The past and future around this fic are intriguing to contemplate.



Even outside of these two stories, it was a lot of fun to see what sort of crossovers people were requesting, and what people ended up posting. There are so many creative combinations to see, even among fandoms I'm not a part of.

Over all a super fun exchange experience, and definitely one I'd like to participate in again in the future.