R. F. Kuang has a book called "Katabasis" that comes out on August 26, 2025. /insert here "good for her" gif

I have a duology of MCU fics I've been calling "katabasis" that I've been working on since I saw Endgame. It's about Natasha and Gamora making their ways out of the afterlife -- except, despite interacting, they're going through different afterlives: Natasha's is Dante's Hell, Gamora's Irkalla, the Mesopotamian underworld. Yes, I'm lots of fun at parties.

Anyway, point is, I want to finish and post those fics before Kuang's book comes out? Deadlines tend to help me do things. Technically the Natasha fic is finished but not the Gamora one and besides I need to make sure their dialogues make sense in both contexts.

Have a handful of lines I'm proud of, idk, I need validation.

1. It took a village to raise a child soldier.

2. Sirens, sirens everywhere and not a song to sing.

3. "I recognise the afterlife has made a decision, but given that it's a stupid ass decision, I've elected to ignore it."

5. Dis was a necropolis in the purest sense; a city of the dead, skyscrapers of graves and tombstones reaching upwards like the drowned's grasping hands.

6. There on the rock sat Tony Stark. Not Iron Man, not the man who'd escape from a cave to dive into a wormhole with a nuke, but Anthony Edward Stark, self-made billionaire, Forbes' golden child, arms dealer, merchant-king of war and woe, Mammon of the Modern Age.

7. "I know I told you to die in a ditch, but I didn't mean it," continued Rocket's voice.

8. "It seems a terrible thing, to believe in sin," Gamora said.

9. But a poppy pod is a thing of death. It weeps sleep and bleeds a painless end.