Homeward by Just_Char
Summary:
Ramsey Murdoch's a nice guy. He's even maybe a good guy, depending on who you ask. But he's not a family guy, alright? So when he gets invited to join Percy and Molly for Christmas in Percy's hometown, well, that's kind of a difficult situation for him. Not because he doesn't care about the two of them, of course he does. But he's not really good with Christmas, or family, or anything in between. Fortunately for him, neither are they.
This is hands down my favourite fic, it's a bit of a slow burn (which I"m not usually for, so you know this ones really good) and it hasn't been updated in awhile but I do not care you should read it anyway.
It's great at tackling the feelings of wanting to have a closer relationship with a person, trusting them above others, wanting to raise a kid with them but not having romantic feelings for them. And not knowing how to approach asking if they want that too because all the words you have ever heard to describe that kind of closeness (girlfriend, wife, even partner) imply at some level romantic intrest, so much so as to also imply that only people in that kind of relationship are allowed to raise kids together and if you want to do one thing with them it must mean you also want to do the other things. But you don't. And you know they don't either and want to respect that. So then what? And its some how tackled all of these unique issues of starting a queerplatonic without the POV character even being the ace one, because these kind of relationships aren't actually exclusively to aspec people and there are plenty of allo people who would also benefit from tearing down allonormatity too.
I've known I was ace since secondary school but only recently have I started exploring what that actually means. For years all I knew was that I didn't experience romantic or sexual attraction and that there was a word for that and nothing else, and I didn't really even realise there was anything else to know because all the ace rep I ever saw treated their characters the same, it was just a label and lack of a partner and no further exploration. And then fandom spaces would ignore it anyway.
It's only really recently that I started connecting with and learning about my community and its so nice to see other people care too.
Part of the reason I love the Epithet fandom so much is its the only place I've been so far that I've been able to trust people to ship the aspec characters respectfully and understand the nuances of these kinds of relationships beyond "queerplatonic is when the regular relationship but has ace in it" that you tend to find elsewhere. But even amongst titans Homeward is a cut above the rest. Read Homeward.
I love this fic so much and even if it never updates again I will reread it every christmas and even when it's not christmas.
