Work Text:
When she woke on the morning of Monday 25th May, 2026, Patsy Busby-Mount jumped out of bed almost the second her eyes opened, ready to rush around the flat she shared with her wife in anticipation of the impending heatwave.
Not a metaphorical one between them – Delia would be too exhausted after a night shift for anything more than kissing, after all – but the literal one about to descend on London.
Growing up as a third culture kid of English parents across various countries in South East Asia might have displaced her sense of identity in more ways than one, but at least she was confident she could keep their home cool enough for her little love to rest through the hottest parts of the day, despite the lack of built-in air conditioning.
Even if it had somewhat scuppered their plans to make the most of a rare mutual Bank Holiday off work. Their picnic could wait until the evening, and this way Delia wouldn’t worry that Patsy was making presumptions about her energy levels.
Meanwhile, Patsy quickly became so preoccupied by pulling blinds and scarves and sheets into place over every possible heat-entryway that she only thought to check her phone once she’d been up and about for half an hour.
And, when she did, she was nonplussed to find a string of notifications from her beloved brunette, getting steadily more sweary… from Tumblr of all places.
They hadn’t messaged on there in months, because work had been too flat out to leave time for fic, but they still used it to keep their online and IRL communications separate. And that meant Patsy still felt a flutter of joyful nostalgia whenever the platform which was essentially responsible for their relationship popped up.
Even now, when the most recent message she could read said simply, “FUCKERS!”
Unlocking her phone, opening the app, and navigating through to their private chat, she scanned the rest:
Justice4Tara95
Pats, cariad, I need you to log in to my AO3 account and delete all my fics posted before Feb 2025
I can’t bear to do it myself
They’ve all been scraped
How dare they
This is what I get for scrolling on a slow shift. Someone in another fandom shared a tool they’d created to check if their works had been stolen and mine have
I shouldn’t be surprised and I’m not really because the internet is public and I kept them unlocked. But some of those stories were so vulnerable. About Tara’s brain injury and amnesia and how much I relate to her, you know?
FUCKERS
Patsy’s heart thudded at the thought of her sweetheart spiralling without her there for support.
Especially because she knew not only how much Delia related to Tara but how much the internet, and fandom, had been a safe space for processing after her accident. (And still was, even over ten years later.)
She also knew how much she herself related to Tara, if due to shared experience of grief and trauma from complicated family histories instead of an injury.
Shit, she realised suddenly, that probably meant her own fics had been taken too.
Thick as thieves, they were.
And so were these thieves, apparently.
Fic as thieves.
Swearing under her breath, she unlocked her phone again (because it was perpetually on Low Power Mode and went dark quickly), then tapped out a short reply:
StoicScooby91
Deels, darling, u online?
In the time it took for a response to arrive, she found herself very aware of the fact that Tumblr was one of the few platforms that didn’t tell you when someone was typing. But it was also one of the few without an algorithm.
Much like AO3, actually.
(Ironically, in this context.)
Justice4Tara95
Yh. Don’t trust myself 2 leave til I’m calm n I’m NOT CALM. Soz bout my rant
Patsy’s heart squeezed again. Txt tlk was how they’d started, true, so it was sort of one of their love languages as mutual millennials. (Just, in Delia’s case.) But still, it was also a sign of her wife’s distress.
Damn different shifts.
Gosh she wanted to give Delia a cwtch.
She did the next best thing.
StoicScooby91
No sorries, sweets. I’M sorry this has happened. When you say scraped, you mean for hey eye, right?
Then she waited with her namesake virtue for her wife’s response:
Justice4Tara95
Pats, you fool. Of course I mean AI. These bots are good but they can’t get into our PMs. You don’t need to use rhyming slang
Grinning at the tone obvious even through text, as well as the thought that her silliness seemed to have prompted a smile, Patsy typed back:
StoicScooby91
IDK, tell that to Zuck
And then felt the opposite of triumphant when Delia replied:
Justice4Tara95
Fair point. GAH
So she decided all she could do was offer solidarity:
StoicScooby91
Would you mind checking my username, please, love? I’m guessing my stories were too but I’m scared.
Justice4Tara95
Ofc. Gimme 5 mins.
She did.
Justice4Tara95
Yh. All scraped. Sori cariad.
She sighed, wishing this sudden, unexpected situation wasn’t such a fucking trigger for so much of the online parts of her childhood trauma (particularly the court case), even though it hadn’t been connected to fandoms.
Delia was right. FUCKERS.
She took a breath, then used the knowledge about anonymity that had been so hard-won in her teens to type back:
StoicScooby91
Thank you. Okay so… they’ve stolen our words to train models without our consent, right? And we can’t do anything if we want to stay anonymous?
That time the gap between replies felt like an eternity.
Justice4Tara95
TBH there’s pretty much fuck all we can do. I think whoever ran the scrape knew that, as well, and it’s why they chose AO3. Even though AO3 has opted out of mass scraping, which means this was an individual person programming the bot(s). I’m sorry, my love, this must be even harder for you than it is for me.
The care and thoughtfulness made her well up, so she quickly typed:
StoicScooby91
It’s a lot. I won’t delete my fics, but I will lock them. I should’ve to start with. But how do we let people know?
Then willed herself not to cry properly as she waited.
Justice4Tara95
Not your fault, Pats. You wanted to be accessible. There are so many lovely guests. As for letting them know… I might write one more public fic about it. To explain what’s happened and why I need to lock fics for registered users only now.
Before staring at her phone in shock at the idea.
Delia was bloody brilliant. Far better than the bloody bots, or the people who controlled them.
But she needed to know her wife was truly comfortable keeping her stories online, so she clarified:
StoicScooby91
You sure you don’t want to delete them? You don’t just have to leave them up for my sake.
Delia, the darling, seemed to have recovered something of her usual spirit, since several messages shot back:
Justice4Tara95
Nah
They don’t get to steal our joy
Tara means too much to me to let her go this easily, Willow too
Long haul, remember?
Like us
Patsy grinned – she did remember. And her “Welsh Wonder” was right. Tara and Willow meant too much to her as well. And no-one, not even fic thieves, got to steal that joy.
Her username wasn’t StoicScooby91 for nothing.
She just had to find a way through the triggers.
With Delia beside her, she thought she might manage it.
Thick as thieves, and no strangers to caution.
They would write, and wait, and love, as they always did.