... having been breathed out

I was thinking in the shower today about the (well-earned, from what I gather) hatred in fannish circles for the seemingly obligatory romantic V plots, often mislabeled "love triangles," that proliferate in YA novels and elsewhere. You know the ones; everyone talks about how boring they are: the main character must choose between two potential love interests and the readership is supposed to root for one or the other. Yawn. But I was thinking about how there actually is an aspect of the V that I would love to read more thoughtful explorations of, both in original fiction and fanfic. And that's the relationship between the two legs of the V, or what folks in the polyamorous community call "metamour" relationships: the relationship one has with the lover/partner of one's lover/partner, a person with whom one is not partnered oneself.

A great example of the kind of thing I'm thinking about is Every Day's Most Quiet Need, the Miss Fisher story that tiltedsyllogism wrote me for Fandom Trumps Hate. The fic is about Mac's developing (or reigniting) sexual relationship with her long-time best friend Phryne, but even more than that it's about the ups and downs of navigating her relationship with Phryne's other (serious) lover, Jack. Mac & Jack are the first tagged relationship, and the story lives up to that: their dynamic, more than Phryne's relationship with either, is really the focus, and Syllogism gives it tremendously careful and insightful attention. One of the things that I really love about this story is that there are ways in which Mac and Jack understand each other better than Phryne understands either of them. Their dynamic is uneasy, and neither of them are exactly comfortable with the other—typical ugly emotions do surface. But there are also emotional currents that are really lovely in their unexpectedness. For example, the thread of protectiveness that Mac feels toward Jack, whose fundamental emotional monogamy she recognizes, and who she fears will be hurt by Phryne's breezy, exuberant free love ethos—even as that freedom is one of the things that both Mac and Jack love about Phryne.

Now I'm trying to think of other examples of stories where the focus is on metamour relationships specifically, and the explicitly romantic one(s) are backgrounded. In Syllogism's fic Mac and Jack have no interest in a sexual relationship with one another, but I'd also be interested in stories about characters who do have some level of sexual connection, yet who remain pretty firmly metamours rather than partners. Arguably, my Bloomsbury RPF fic The Obvious and Proper Sense qualifies, although it's really a grey area because Keynes and Strachey's preoccupation with each other far eclipses either of their connections to their shared object of affection, Hobhouse. A story about the era of their lives when they were successively dating Duncan Grant would be more squarely in this metamour category, I think, since Grant was an extremely long-standing shared passion for them both. (Shockingly, I already have an outline for this story.) The process-object-lesson Rambouillet story, in which female rivals for a single man's affection devote every waking moment to thinking eroticized malevolent thoughts about each other before, in later life, becoming close friends, also fits the bill. (Will I ever actually write this one? Only time will tell.)

Do other fics that fit this pattern leap to mind? In various Holmesian fandoms I would think there might be stories that focus on the relationship between Sherlock Holmes and Mary Morstan Watson; in The Magicians maybe fics spending time on the dynamic between Quentin & Margo during a period when they're both heavily, though differently, involved with and invested in Eliot; or between Eliot and Alice when they're both in some way involved with Quentin. In Black Sails this might be a story that focused on the relationship between Max and Jack. Killing Eve's Anna dies before this really has a chance to develop, but in some kind of AU situation I can definitely see a fascinating relationship evolving between her and Eve, since they are set up by the show as so directly parallel in terms of what attracts them to Villanelle/Oksana, and the role of V's impulsivity and violence in giving expression to similar elements in their own personalities. They would be able to see that in each other in a way that Villanelle... isn't blind to, but has a much different perspective on.

I'm sure there are many more examples, and would love to hear about them. (As a note: I prize emotional realism over unremitting optimism, which is a problem I've encountered with some fictional depictions of polyamory: I'd prefer stories that don't pretend away the difficult emotions that come with relationship negotiation, but instead address them and work through them. I don't consider myself poly as an identity, but I am non-monogamous and have dated a lot in the poly world, and much like every other kind of human relationship, it is not all sunshine and rainbows. Non-monogamy shouldn't have to prove its validity by pretending that jealousy, insecurity, and time management just... aren't things that anyone struggles with.) ANYWAY if you have recs, leave 'em in my comments!