MARGO WALKED SO MARS COULD RUN!!! I say, with false enthusiasm knowing she is going to jail for the rest of her life and we will probably not see her in future seasons
So this is barely a WiP -- it's just a few hundred words of rumination from Irina's perspective without any real plot as such. I like to imagine that at some point I will get an idea for an actual, you know, plot (or even a robust premise! I would settle for that!) and then I'll finish it and put it into the world. But here in the meantime are some early paragraphs:
---
She has lost some of her beauty as she’s gotten older — she is not a woman who knows how to take care of what she has, or more likely she is not interested. Irina doesn’t mind. To see her hunched, stumbling, vulnerable where once she was graceful is delicious in its own way.
She moves now like a person without power. And that is fine. That is what she is. If she perceives Irina giving it to her, so much the better. She will know where it comes from, and she will know who can take it away.
Hello I am curious about “we’re not friends.” (because: who is not friends? [I have some guesses]) and “there are only victims of virtue here” because that is a banger title
oh man okay a VERY COOL KID in my inbox LETS GO
11. we're not friends i blame entirely on @moocowmoocow writing this molly/karen femslash february fic that i happened to read right as I was getting to the karen/danny arc in s2 like honestly it might have been literally the first FAM fic i ever read just blindly opening the tag and it gave me some kind of brainworm i could not get rid of. {there really are so many people this title could apply to sooo curious about the guesses}
Tiny snippet:
"Oh! I can come back another time. It's nothing urgent."
"Nonsense. He'll be home..." Molly waved a vague hand. "Sometime. Eventually. You can come in. Have a drink. Smoke. Both."
Nervously, Karen stepped into the Wayne-free Cobb residence after Molly. "Well, if you're sure he'll be by soon."
"Didn't say that." Molly lit a cigarette. Offered the pack.
Karen used two fingers to press it away. "No thank you." Seconds ticket by as Molly smoked, leaning idly against the frame of the kitchen doorway, watching her. Karen swallowed and wrung her hands. "If it's going to be a while I can really—"
"It really bothers you, being here with just me."
Karen's mouth fell open. "No, I— Well, there's no reason for you and I to— You're Ed's friend," she said a little sharply. "Wayne and I are friends. It's... a little odd, but it makes sense, given your— Given his—"
"Given Wayne's the astronaut wife."
Something about that made Karen flush.
4. there are only victims of virtue here is... margo x irina. i am pretty sure i am never going to post this fic so the fact that there are more than 20,000 words of it is completely inexplicable the margo in russia arc really just hit me like a truck.
its a mix of expanding on a bunch of season 4 itself and an exploration of what might happen if irina gets to decide star city isn't through with Margo after the season ends after all.
here's one early bit of it tacked onto the night after the coup
Her flat is unwelcoming when she stumbles in at quarter to ten. It should be relief, taking off her coat, unwrapping her scarf, fumbling her way into the shower to finish washing the blood out of her hair. She should feel safe now.
She doesn’t. She sees the dark spots in the corners of her shower she’s never been able to scrub away. The flecks on the vinyl curtain she should have replaced months ago. The crack in the cheap mirror whose dingy glass manages to make her look paler than she is. Levering herself down into her bed, it’s not her old life she’s comparing it to. She’s lived in worse. This place has multiple rooms, a functional television, even an out-of-tune piano. It’s not like she’s regressed to her bare bones fresh-out-of-college apartment she never even furnished for preference of furnishing her closet-sized office.
Her broken glasses make a concerning clicking noise when she sets them down on the bedside table. She turns out the light without looking and groans her way into a position that only aggravates every single muscle that’s been tugged the wrong way in the last twenty-four hours, but doesn’t seem like it’ll prevent her from falling asleep. It’s not even that she can’t feel safe in this part of the city anymore, after being forcibly dragged away.
It’s the itching, straining feeling that she shouldn’t be here.
That she was exactly where she was supposed to be three hours ago. Before two of Director Morozova’s silent, scowling men drove her home.
In an empty Roscosmos building scattered with the remnants of its last guard—half-finished cups of coffee, papers strewn across desks and floors, a single broken briefcase leaning up against the knee of the cosmonaut in the mural in the main lobby. Where Irina had said, “I expect you back here tomorrow, Ms. Madison.”
Margo—rattled and bruised and bloody and exhausted as she was—had said, “Are you sure you wouldn’t like me to… stay?”
Just wondering if the "For All Mankind" fandom also thinks Irina Morozova and Sergei Nikulov were lovers. That is why Irina has a photo of Sergei. And that is also why she has associated herself with Margo Madison.