colorcoded (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
colorcoded) wrote2021-07-09 01:24 am
colorcoded) wrote2021-07-09 01:24 am
Dalliance (Odo/Quark)
I've been very spotty about crossposting my recent fics here. But I'll crosspost this one because I have some thoughts I want to share about it.
Title: Dalliance
Fandom/Pairing: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine; Odo/Quark
Rating/Warnings: NC-17; sex work, seduction, anal sex, referenced voyeurism, possessiveness, hate sex
Summary/Prompt: Inspired by a romance/erotica short story summary: Barman Quark hates that he's had to resort to giving favors to customers for a few extra strips of latinum, but everyone is scrambling for money with the revolution boiling out of control. Even so, Quark enjoys his illicit activities—particularly when he meets Odo, a caring, handsome patron whom he desires even more than his coin.
But Quark has also caught the eye of a revolutionary who makes him share one of his missions. A mission that plunges Quark deeper into the revolution when he's tasked with seducing a rich lord and Odo at the same time...
Or: Quark seduces Odo and has a lot of sex (pre-canon/late Terok Nor era).
Word Count: 11616
I had a lot of fun with this one.
Getting the initial idea
This was done for![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
unconventionalcourtship, so I browsed the randomizer tool for some summaries, and saved ones that fit the Odo/Quark dynamic in a doc. The one I ended up using was actually the first one I came across - the very specific job of "barmaid/barman" fit Quark perfectly, and then I decided that the "revolution" here could work quite well for Bajoran resistance movement. So that immediately placed the time setting to use for the fic - late Terok Nor era when things are becoming more chaotic.
(I still have the other reject prompts (plot summaries that fit Quodo but I didn't end up using) sitting around, which I'm happy to share if anyone is interested.)
Adapting the prompt
Some things worked quite well about the prompt: The idea that Quark does sex work (or at least incorporates sex into his business deals) is a bit of fanon that I find plausible and wanted to do something with. The summary includes multiple love interests (the revolutionary, the handsome patron, the rich lord). However, the only named one - the handsome patron - is coincidentally named Rene. How appropriate! I liked the idea of Odo playing the role of a patron who has a bit more personal interest in Quark than what Quark is used to. That said, I don't think I was able to incorporate what I was thinking here quite so strongly in the final product as I would have liked. The story morphed quite a bit over time (more on that later). Originally, I envisioned Odo as someone who buys Quark's services in the same casual way as Quark's other customers, but he does it with a more sentimental, mooning sort of air - he has settled for buying Quark's time and company on a short-term basis, but in reality, he would prefer to have Quark in a more complete and total sense. But this was difficult because I was undecided for quite a while whether it was actually in-character for Odo to pay Quark for sex like this, especially considering Odo's position, their existing antagonism, and Odo's squeamishness around sex. If I made Odo and Quark's relationship more AU where they're a bit more like strangers (as in the original short story), I could see this, but in the end I decided to stick a bit more closely to their canon dynamic.
There were also some parts of the prompt that were too hard to work with that I ended up throwing them out entirely. The element of Quark hating having to give customers favors I basically just ended up ignoring - Ferengi are too hedonistic. Of course, maybe what Quark hates here is the state of being strapped for latinum (Ferengi would hate being poor). But I ended up not going into this that much (more on this in the next section). The other major change is that the original summary featured a "revolutionary who makes her share his bed and one of his missions." I considered various possibilities for who this "revolutionary" might be and decided it was probably simplest just to make them a member of the Bajoran resistance. This changed the power dynamics pretty significantly, making it difficult for a Bajoran to make Quark do anything (so I changed this to providing Quark an economic incentive) and also making a sexual relationship a bit of a stretch (so I just dropped this aspect). But it might have been interesting to have this role filled by a Cardassian supporting the Bajoran resistance who might have been able to twist Quark's arm a bit more? Perhaps someone a bit like Natima except even more subversive and decisive in their actions.
On the other hand, the part of the prompt involving having to seduce Odo worked quite well with Odo's position as chief of security, so that was promising.
Fleshing out the idea
Once I decided on the prompt, I still had a lot of details to flesh out. Who was the rich lord? What was the mission Quark was given that required seducing Odo and the rich lord? What would be the general plot, and how would it end? The answer to the second question (the mission Quark is given) partly depends on the answer to the third question (what are the basic events of the fic). Answering these questions was the hardest part of this fic, because there weren't many constraints at this point and so the field of possibilities was so wide.
To give myself some basic structure, I decided that I wanted to write a fic where Quark and Odo have sex three times (magic number 3), which are initially fairly casual and transactional and become more vulnerable and emotionally intimate over time. Odo eventually lets down his guard down enough to say something to Quark that indicates he might actually earnestly have feelings for Quark. This causes Quark to feel so guilty about what he's doing that he confesses to Odo what's going on, which of course ruins both the mission and his budding relationship with Odo (this is in line with most of Quark's plotlines where his fortunes might go up temporarily but they tend to go back down/return to status quo, and his dishonesty/honesty tends to be punished/rewarded appropriately). The main dramatic tension here is therefore the misunderstanding/gap in understanding between what Odo and Quark believe is happening in these sexual encounters, which is resolved in the end. I was undecided about whether to make the ending happy (Odo and Quark reconcile and keep seeing each other) or bittersweet (they break up and don't really revisit their relationship) and left that to be decided at the end as I wrote. With this skeleton, I was able to make decisions about the other major questions.
At this stage, I also spent a lot of time trying to answer some basic questions about the premise: Has Quark always done sex work or is it something he's done more in recent times in response to the current situation? How does his sex work go along with his sale of sexual holosuites? What type of people tend to go for the former vs. the latter? What is Odo's attitude toward these things? How interested is he in them? How disgusted? Does he understand the appeal or is he confused by it the way he is with various humanoid activities? How much information about his inner state is he willing to reveal to Quark? The fic didn't actually really go into any of this, which I regret a bit as it would have helped set the scene, but it was difficult to work it organically into the story/into a scene without it being infodump. But I did have initial versions of scenes between Quark and Odo where they discuss the first few things at length, which at the same time gave some insight into Odo's inner state.
However, I decided I was better off keeping the fic as lean as possible and only using the scenes to set up the plot. In particular, I decided I just needed to establish a small number of things for the sake of the plot: (1) Odo does want to have sex with Quark but has never acted on this desire, (2) Quark and also the "revolutionary" character both have reason to suspect that (1) is true. Aside from these basics, however, I decided to keep most of Odo's inner state hidden. The final result was a very pared-down scene that doesn't have much background information at all and almost entirely focuses either on sex or establishing sexual tension.
At this point, you can see that Odo's role in the story continued to change and migrate quite a bit from my original vision.
Actually writing
In the end, I actually stuck pretty faithfully to the basic skeleton plot outlined in the planning phase. However, there were quite a few unexpected ways that plot ended up unfolding as I wrote, which surprised me.
The biggest one was the way the sex scenes become more emotionally intimate over time. I originally envisioned this as the sex becoming more tender and sweet. Uh... This did not happen! When I was planning the sex scenes, I had a list of elements I wanted to incorporate (example: Quark interrupting sex and Odo revealing his nervousness/insecurity, Odo being oddly not disheveled by sex, Quark noting how appealing Odo's shapeshifting abilities are for sex which makes Odo uncomfortable, etc., etc.). One element I wanted was the idea (either explicit or implied) that Odo hasn't actually had sex before but knows a lot about it because he's been closely observing Quark's encounters with other clients. I knew this aspect would make Quark uncomfortable, though, so I wanted it to come up as late as possible (in other words, after Quark has already become a bit invested in this whole thing and there's now a sunk cost in pulling out).
However, when this plot point came up, I kind of belatedly realized this revelation was probably a bigger deal than I had initially envisioned it. I initially thought it wouldn't really affect the trajectory Odo and Quark were on (that is, gradually learning more about each other and becoming closer over time). However, as I was writing, I realized that it had the potential to itself be a source of drama and tension in the relationship to the point of being capable of derailing the budding relationship. It goes to a core disagreement between Quark and Odo's values - Quark's libertarian tendencies vs. Odo's authoritarian ones. I couldn't see Odo being apologetic for these actions (although possibly embarrassed by or ashamed of them), and while Quark would be willing to smooth the situation over for the sake of the mission, that act of self-abnegation would itself be a source of tension that would feel unsatisfying if left unresolved. I unexpectedly found myself having to decide whether this revelation leads to a break-up, a bit earlier than scheduled! (I ended up going with no clear resolution, where both Quark and Odo are unsure whether this has been a dealbreaker or forgiven, because they are interrupted before they are able to discuss it.)
The difficulty then is how to pull Odo back in, despite the fact he would understandably be tempted to withdraw after this setback. Luckily, I had always intended there to be an element of jealousy/possessiveness/desire for exclusivity secretly going on with Odo that hadn't really explicitly come up but was always an element in the background with little hints. Quark's encounter with the "rich lord," which had to happen at some point, was convenient for activating this jealousy.
Quark and Odo's third encounter, therefore, did develop their relationship and make it more revealing/intimate but from a completely unexpected angle: it involved resolving the tension between Quark and Odo's moral systems, where they willingly meet in the middle while acknowledging that they're both conflicted about it. I didn't expect this is what the third scene would be like, but it seemed to follow naturally from all I had written before that this scene would be a tender and somewhat confusing mix of make-up sex and hate sex.
The other major departure from my original plan is that I always intended for the major emotional climax of this fic to be Quark and Odo dealing with the fallout of Quark's initial deception. There is some of that, but in the end Odo seemed more upset about Quark being a security threat to the station than Quark being dishonest in his romantic overtures to Odo. Which uh... is probably in-character, which is why it ended up that way. But it's a bit different from how I initially envisioned it. I wanted to spend a bit more time/lean more deeply into Odo being romantically burned by this experience, and Quark's feelings of guilt and remorse about that. But I couldn't find a good place/time to explore this, so it ended up being a bit underexplored, unfortunately.
Finally, the ending: in the end, I decided to keep it ambiguous between the happy and bittersweet options and leave it open-ended, where the events of the fic have made Quark and Odo more aware of the costs of being in a relationship with each other but they both are still tempted by/interested in the possibility nevertheless. They're both less naive, and also more aware of the other's flaws but it hasn't really changed their underlying feelings and attraction to each other.
Title: Dalliance
Fandom/Pairing: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine; Odo/Quark
Rating/Warnings: NC-17; sex work, seduction, anal sex, referenced voyeurism, possessiveness, hate sex
Summary/Prompt: Inspired by a romance/erotica short story summary: Barman Quark hates that he's had to resort to giving favors to customers for a few extra strips of latinum, but everyone is scrambling for money with the revolution boiling out of control. Even so, Quark enjoys his illicit activities—particularly when he meets Odo, a caring, handsome patron whom he desires even more than his coin.
But Quark has also caught the eye of a revolutionary who makes him share one of his missions. A mission that plunges Quark deeper into the revolution when he's tasked with seducing a rich lord and Odo at the same time...
Or: Quark seduces Odo and has a lot of sex (pre-canon/late Terok Nor era).
Word Count: 11616
I had a lot of fun with this one.
Getting the initial idea
This was done for
unconventionalcourtship, so I browsed the randomizer tool for some summaries, and saved ones that fit the Odo/Quark dynamic in a doc. The one I ended up using was actually the first one I came across - the very specific job of "barmaid/barman" fit Quark perfectly, and then I decided that the "revolution" here could work quite well for Bajoran resistance movement. So that immediately placed the time setting to use for the fic - late Terok Nor era when things are becoming more chaotic.(I still have the other reject prompts (plot summaries that fit Quodo but I didn't end up using) sitting around, which I'm happy to share if anyone is interested.)
Adapting the prompt
Some things worked quite well about the prompt: The idea that Quark does sex work (or at least incorporates sex into his business deals) is a bit of fanon that I find plausible and wanted to do something with. The summary includes multiple love interests (the revolutionary, the handsome patron, the rich lord). However, the only named one - the handsome patron - is coincidentally named Rene. How appropriate! I liked the idea of Odo playing the role of a patron who has a bit more personal interest in Quark than what Quark is used to. That said, I don't think I was able to incorporate what I was thinking here quite so strongly in the final product as I would have liked. The story morphed quite a bit over time (more on that later). Originally, I envisioned Odo as someone who buys Quark's services in the same casual way as Quark's other customers, but he does it with a more sentimental, mooning sort of air - he has settled for buying Quark's time and company on a short-term basis, but in reality, he would prefer to have Quark in a more complete and total sense. But this was difficult because I was undecided for quite a while whether it was actually in-character for Odo to pay Quark for sex like this, especially considering Odo's position, their existing antagonism, and Odo's squeamishness around sex. If I made Odo and Quark's relationship more AU where they're a bit more like strangers (as in the original short story), I could see this, but in the end I decided to stick a bit more closely to their canon dynamic.
There were also some parts of the prompt that were too hard to work with that I ended up throwing them out entirely. The element of Quark hating having to give customers favors I basically just ended up ignoring - Ferengi are too hedonistic. Of course, maybe what Quark hates here is the state of being strapped for latinum (Ferengi would hate being poor). But I ended up not going into this that much (more on this in the next section). The other major change is that the original summary featured a "revolutionary who makes her share his bed and one of his missions." I considered various possibilities for who this "revolutionary" might be and decided it was probably simplest just to make them a member of the Bajoran resistance. This changed the power dynamics pretty significantly, making it difficult for a Bajoran to make Quark do anything (so I changed this to providing Quark an economic incentive) and also making a sexual relationship a bit of a stretch (so I just dropped this aspect). But it might have been interesting to have this role filled by a Cardassian supporting the Bajoran resistance who might have been able to twist Quark's arm a bit more? Perhaps someone a bit like Natima except even more subversive and decisive in their actions.
On the other hand, the part of the prompt involving having to seduce Odo worked quite well with Odo's position as chief of security, so that was promising.
Fleshing out the idea
Once I decided on the prompt, I still had a lot of details to flesh out. Who was the rich lord? What was the mission Quark was given that required seducing Odo and the rich lord? What would be the general plot, and how would it end? The answer to the second question (the mission Quark is given) partly depends on the answer to the third question (what are the basic events of the fic). Answering these questions was the hardest part of this fic, because there weren't many constraints at this point and so the field of possibilities was so wide.
To give myself some basic structure, I decided that I wanted to write a fic where Quark and Odo have sex three times (magic number 3), which are initially fairly casual and transactional and become more vulnerable and emotionally intimate over time. Odo eventually lets down his guard down enough to say something to Quark that indicates he might actually earnestly have feelings for Quark. This causes Quark to feel so guilty about what he's doing that he confesses to Odo what's going on, which of course ruins both the mission and his budding relationship with Odo (this is in line with most of Quark's plotlines where his fortunes might go up temporarily but they tend to go back down/return to status quo, and his dishonesty/honesty tends to be punished/rewarded appropriately). The main dramatic tension here is therefore the misunderstanding/gap in understanding between what Odo and Quark believe is happening in these sexual encounters, which is resolved in the end. I was undecided about whether to make the ending happy (Odo and Quark reconcile and keep seeing each other) or bittersweet (they break up and don't really revisit their relationship) and left that to be decided at the end as I wrote. With this skeleton, I was able to make decisions about the other major questions.
At this stage, I also spent a lot of time trying to answer some basic questions about the premise: Has Quark always done sex work or is it something he's done more in recent times in response to the current situation? How does his sex work go along with his sale of sexual holosuites? What type of people tend to go for the former vs. the latter? What is Odo's attitude toward these things? How interested is he in them? How disgusted? Does he understand the appeal or is he confused by it the way he is with various humanoid activities? How much information about his inner state is he willing to reveal to Quark? The fic didn't actually really go into any of this, which I regret a bit as it would have helped set the scene, but it was difficult to work it organically into the story/into a scene without it being infodump. But I did have initial versions of scenes between Quark and Odo where they discuss the first few things at length, which at the same time gave some insight into Odo's inner state.
However, I decided I was better off keeping the fic as lean as possible and only using the scenes to set up the plot. In particular, I decided I just needed to establish a small number of things for the sake of the plot: (1) Odo does want to have sex with Quark but has never acted on this desire, (2) Quark and also the "revolutionary" character both have reason to suspect that (1) is true. Aside from these basics, however, I decided to keep most of Odo's inner state hidden. The final result was a very pared-down scene that doesn't have much background information at all and almost entirely focuses either on sex or establishing sexual tension.
At this point, you can see that Odo's role in the story continued to change and migrate quite a bit from my original vision.
Actually writing
In the end, I actually stuck pretty faithfully to the basic skeleton plot outlined in the planning phase. However, there were quite a few unexpected ways that plot ended up unfolding as I wrote, which surprised me.
The biggest one was the way the sex scenes become more emotionally intimate over time. I originally envisioned this as the sex becoming more tender and sweet. Uh... This did not happen! When I was planning the sex scenes, I had a list of elements I wanted to incorporate (example: Quark interrupting sex and Odo revealing his nervousness/insecurity, Odo being oddly not disheveled by sex, Quark noting how appealing Odo's shapeshifting abilities are for sex which makes Odo uncomfortable, etc., etc.). One element I wanted was the idea (either explicit or implied) that Odo hasn't actually had sex before but knows a lot about it because he's been closely observing Quark's encounters with other clients. I knew this aspect would make Quark uncomfortable, though, so I wanted it to come up as late as possible (in other words, after Quark has already become a bit invested in this whole thing and there's now a sunk cost in pulling out).
However, when this plot point came up, I kind of belatedly realized this revelation was probably a bigger deal than I had initially envisioned it. I initially thought it wouldn't really affect the trajectory Odo and Quark were on (that is, gradually learning more about each other and becoming closer over time). However, as I was writing, I realized that it had the potential to itself be a source of drama and tension in the relationship to the point of being capable of derailing the budding relationship. It goes to a core disagreement between Quark and Odo's values - Quark's libertarian tendencies vs. Odo's authoritarian ones. I couldn't see Odo being apologetic for these actions (although possibly embarrassed by or ashamed of them), and while Quark would be willing to smooth the situation over for the sake of the mission, that act of self-abnegation would itself be a source of tension that would feel unsatisfying if left unresolved. I unexpectedly found myself having to decide whether this revelation leads to a break-up, a bit earlier than scheduled! (I ended up going with no clear resolution, where both Quark and Odo are unsure whether this has been a dealbreaker or forgiven, because they are interrupted before they are able to discuss it.)
The difficulty then is how to pull Odo back in, despite the fact he would understandably be tempted to withdraw after this setback. Luckily, I had always intended there to be an element of jealousy/possessiveness/desire for exclusivity secretly going on with Odo that hadn't really explicitly come up but was always an element in the background with little hints. Quark's encounter with the "rich lord," which had to happen at some point, was convenient for activating this jealousy.
Quark and Odo's third encounter, therefore, did develop their relationship and make it more revealing/intimate but from a completely unexpected angle: it involved resolving the tension between Quark and Odo's moral systems, where they willingly meet in the middle while acknowledging that they're both conflicted about it. I didn't expect this is what the third scene would be like, but it seemed to follow naturally from all I had written before that this scene would be a tender and somewhat confusing mix of make-up sex and hate sex.
The other major departure from my original plan is that I always intended for the major emotional climax of this fic to be Quark and Odo dealing with the fallout of Quark's initial deception. There is some of that, but in the end Odo seemed more upset about Quark being a security threat to the station than Quark being dishonest in his romantic overtures to Odo. Which uh... is probably in-character, which is why it ended up that way. But it's a bit different from how I initially envisioned it. I wanted to spend a bit more time/lean more deeply into Odo being romantically burned by this experience, and Quark's feelings of guilt and remorse about that. But I couldn't find a good place/time to explore this, so it ended up being a bit underexplored, unfortunately.
Finally, the ending: in the end, I decided to keep it ambiguous between the happy and bittersweet options and leave it open-ended, where the events of the fic have made Quark and Odo more aware of the costs of being in a relationship with each other but they both are still tempted by/interested in the possibility nevertheless. They're both less naive, and also more aware of the other's flaws but it hasn't really changed their underlying feelings and attraction to each other.