LINKDING

summary: She'd never been anyone's favorite before he'd told her that, the lesser daughter of a prestigious family that had enough heirs and spares that she could be given away and the act called an honor. It was a scary but lovely thing to be the best, the most loved. When she'd heard those words she'd clutched them to her chest and hoped she'd never prove them false. That did not mean that she did not hate him, too. // OR: Ning Yingying loves her shizun; she loves Binghe, too. These things come into conflict, whether she wants them to or not. ➤ an svsss fic set in the original PIDW, about Ning Yingying ➤ and holy shit this fic is so good, so everything I didn't even know to hope for from a fic about pidw nyy, I am all emotions?! ➤ the complexity of nyy's relationships with sqq and lbh, the mix of love and hate, the way she doesn't feel able to do anything but to witness and to go along with how things are ➤ and seeing the awful things that happen through her eyes.....it's so powerful and bleak and believable ➤ I adore this fic, I'm just absolutely blown away by it ➤ 9k words

Summary: <blockquote>The far stall in the ladies room in the Land of the Dead was backed up again. The day had already started terribly, with an email that hit my phone as I walked the 387 steps from my staff cabin to the front desk, an email from Lana saying Vera, I wanted you to find out directly from me that I’ve started seeing somebody. Call if you want to talk.</blockquote> ➤ about queer intergenerational friendship and mentorship, about being a young adult trying to find your place, about death and what it means to you, about living through the death of all your peers and coming out the other side, about hope and love and making connections. ➤ holy shit this gave me so many emotions. READ IT READ IT READ IT. ➤ also I adore the title. pinsker writes great titles. ➤ 6k words in length

Summary: <blockquote>The reality of things happening in order, one after another after another, is not at all like the Doctor imagined it would be.</blockquote> ➤ I left the doctor who era of my life behind in 2012 but when one of my beloved doctor who friends posted a new fic today inspired by the newest doctor who happenings, I had to read it ➤ and guess what I had SO many feelings! the doctor! and donna! and finding ways to rest and live a linear life on earth with people he cares about and learning how to find the mundane things worth paying attention to! ➤ 3k words in length

Summary: <blockquote>During one of the much smaller disasters that preceded the really big disaster, I met a lot of my neighbors online. I can’t remember if we set up the WhatsApp group because of the pandemic or the civil disorder or both. My Minneapolis block had always been reasonably friendly—people would take their kids around on Halloween, and I knew the names of my next-door neighbors—but everyone on the WhatsApp group got closer. When the Internet and cell phones went down, my next-door neighbor to the north, Tanesha, built a little booth in her yard out of plywood, with corkboard inside and a roof, and painted WHATSUP on the outside, so people could leave each other messages inside. When I went in the first day to check it out, people were already posting up notes asking to swap stuff—coffee for condoms, cat food for diapers, a bike repair for a plumbing repair. The stores were empty but maybe someone on the block had what you needed.</blockquote>

<blockquote>He’s twenty-nine when he gets out of the Kiln. He thinks. Time moves in its own eddies and swirls — in the streets, in the war, in death. He thinks he died when he was eighteen and he thinks there was about a year there before he wound up in Mount Tong’lu and by his best guess, it’s been ten years since he’s seen the world outside of this mountain. So the newest Supreme Ghost King, first since the White-Clothed Calamity, emerges from the fire and wreckage of Mount Tong’lu a year shy of thirty. He steps out of the fire and the ash with teeth bared, and below his feet, the world shakes. / The road from Wu Ming to Crimson Rain</blockquote> ➤ Hua Cheng's story during the 800 years he's looking for his god!

<blockquote>Start at the cleave of it, not at Zed’s meat death or Ep’s centuries-long destruction, but at the moment that Zed halves his own mind and walks away. Or as was reported in the internal memorandum, the moment when Pilot-Commander Zeta San Tano killed himself at his infinite post on the M.K.S. Epsilon, leaving behind an empty airlock and a crippled starship unable to communicate, limping its way home after battle, carrying a full complement of soldiers. When the ship returned to base, the staff at Amalgam Research tried to parse whether the M.K.S. Epsilon was aware of Commander Zeta’s upcoming suicide. It must have been. The M.K.S. Epsilon was functionally equivalent to Zeta San Tano. To speak of one was to speak of the other. But without Zed, Ep was silent.</blockquote>

<blockquote>When the former Madam Lan hears that the new Sect Leader Lan married a criminal who is kept in the same house where she once lived, she has only one choice. She has to return to Cloud Recesses to rescue Wei Wuxian!</blockquote> ➤ first chapter is what's in the summary, second is lxc's response to his mother's return

<blockquote>A company data analyst is assigned to find someone to blame for Murderbot going rogue. Doing so requires the company making connections between data points it had not previously made.</blockquote> ➤ yeah. YEAH.

<blockquote>The original Shen Qingqiu suffers a severe deviation that unsettles his daemon, transforming them into a childish and inconstant creature, too curious and without any memories of the life that has made him so bitter. His soul is now unrecognizable to him and everyone can see his humiliation. Shen Yuan isn't exactly happy to have transmigrated into Proud Immortal Demon Way at all, much less as this doomed scum villain's daemon. A His Dark Materials Fusion AU. Knowledge of HDM not required.</blockquote> ➤ enjoyed this more than the average daemon au, I think because both the daemon and human are characters I care about, and so I cared about their relationship. genius idea to make sy sj's daemon!

<blockquote>AIs don't always feel emotions the same way humans do. They don't always express those emotions in the same way, either. That makes living and working together a challenge, but one that the crew of the experimental advanced research transport The Perihelion are more than willing to rise to.</blockquote>

<blockquote>(Or, Shen Jiu isn’t quite sure whose body he has stolen, but he knows for certain he isn’t going to give it back without a fight.)</blockquote> ➤ hopeful ending

<blockquote>She took the coffee-hot chocolate mix, grinned at the misshapen white marshmallow lump that Doris had fabricated for her coffee, and came to a stand next to the forward window to look out upon the expanse of Venusian clouds that roiled pleasingly in front of the blimp lab, aglow with the sunset that would deepen over the next few weeks. She used to stand here with Jorn, her husband. What was it now … six … seven months ago? He’d made it all of three weeks after Earth went silent, the poor emotional, beautiful wreck of a man, weeping nonstop for days.</blockquote>

<blockquote>It’s too late for any of Hanguang-Jun’s rabbits to be awake -- one of the sundown chores for young disciples is to herd them back into their hutch -- but the rabbit field is as good a spot as any for quality sulking, so Lan Jingyi makes his way there. Someone has beat him to it. Lan Jingyi stares at Hanguang-Jun. Hanguang-Jun stares passively back. When Lan Sizhui is swept away with the Ghost General, off on a new adventure, Lan Jingyi is the one who returns to Cloud Recesses alone. </blockquote>

<blockquote>“Well, when I asked Wei-gongzi what you might want for your birthday, he asked me what I could give you that no one else could.” Lan Sizhui can’t help but smile. It’s so Wei-qianbei to answer a question with a question. “A-and I thought… if you wanted, I could…” The next words are so quiet, Lan Sizhui struggles to hear them. “I thought I could show you our family.” For Lan Sizhui's birthday, he receives a glimpse behind the curtain of all that was. </blockquote>

<blockquote>Murderbot is at a party. This is not a normal state of affairs for SecUnits. Neither is the comfy clothes or the sitting or the way the humans keep smiling in its general direction. The smiling, it suspects, will stop, if/when they realise their SecUnit has suffered some sort of catastrophic glitch and has no idea where it is or the specifics of its current assignment. So it's not going to let them find out.</blockquote> ➤ yessss

<blockquote>For a seemingly well-maintained but bedridden Concepción, Rosamie expected generalized wear and tear, maybe an electrical short in the legs. But diagnostics enumerated four limbs, the typical processors and vital periphera all in fair condition, and then it listed an extra drive, and an extra drive, and an extra drive, and an extra drive … A standard Concepción had three spares. This client had four thousand and thirteen. > You see? the client said. No need for fuss. I need only basic maintenance, until my transference into the city.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Lan Qiren finds a boy on the streets of Yiling and the world changes. A story in three parts</blockquote>

<blockquote>The blob finished rotating into place in a way that wasn’t quite compatible with geometry as Shen Qingqiu understood it, and cleared a throat it didn’t seem to have. “Greetings,” it said, somehow clearly addressing him in particular more than the room as a whole despite its total lack of features other than blueness and translucency. “I’m here on behalf of the Hyper-Celestial Peace and Order Enforcement Bureau. Crime scene secure, proceeding to interviews. Beginning with Subject One: You are Shen Qingqiu, formerly Shen Yuan, also known as Peerless Cucumber?”</blockquote> ➤ the one where a space cop comes to a peak lord meeting to explain that the people behind the system are being punished, and thus unintentionally revealing a whole pile of sqq & sqh's secrets ➤ series consists of: and judgment is just like a cup that we share and the wind takes a bird where it blows well past the weeds

<blockquote>“Stephen, use your spectacles, tell me if I don’t mistake what I read.” Maturin took the paper from across the table. “Your eyes do not deceive you, dear. You are made full Admiral, Admiral of the Blue, effective this week. I give you joy of it.” “Admiral of the Blue,” repeated Jack, wonderingly. “Can it really be so. It seems just yesterday…” And here he gazed off, thinking, as Stephen was, of the very moment he had first raised a blue pennant at his mizzen-mast.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Wen in body, Wei in motion, Lan Wangji is certain he has never hated, nor loved, any being so much as he feels towards the boy in his room. After Wei Wuxian's death and his own severe punishment, Lan Wangji must decide the direction his life will take.</blockquote> ➤ lwj & a-yuan, as lwj slowly recovers from the discipline whip ➤ brief sequel also good, about sizhui's courtesy name ➤ series consists of: Velle: to will, to wish Wynn: joy

<blockquote>And whatever is at the inner gate -- a something, not a someone -- has already passed clean through the wards. Which means whatever it is, it isn’t barred from entry. It’s waiting. / When a shadow appears at Cloud Recesses, an impromptu night hunt begins to unfold. </blockquote> ➤ the one where lxc's grief is manifesting as a resentful spirit when he's sleeping & dreaming. Also it's about sizhui's relationships with all the adults in his life and also with jingyi

<blockquote>Head disciples Shen Qingqiu and Liu Qingge are caught by slavers and locked in a woodshed. It’s a rat trap meant for rat boys, and Liu Qingge isn’t one. Shen Qingqiu would’ve been pleased at his humiliation, if he wasn’t certain that this—either the trap or Liu Qingge himself—would utterly destroy him. Somehow, they make it out as friends.</blockquote>

<blockquote>In the aftermath of getting hacked, Murderbot asks ART to help it make sure it can't be hacked the same way again. As it turns out, applying and testing a security patch is a little more challenging than usual when the vulnerable system is, you know, your own brain.</blockquote>

<blockquote>“I’m serious," Jin Ling presses. "You think Lanling Jin can survive another scandal? Another horrible sect leader? I have to be perfect! That’s what this entire conference is about!” “I thought it was about fostering inter-sect harmony,” Lan Jingyi deadpans, which, damnably, is a direct line from the invitation. / A year after the fall of Jin Guangyao, Jinlintai opens its doors to prove there is nothing to hide. Jin Ling is just trying to survive the week. </blockquote> ➤ jin ling processing his complicated feelings about his dead uncle jgy, and his place as sect leader

<blockquote>To someone who knows how to look, Gusu Lan is watching and waiting, one eye on the horizon. When Wei Wuxian fails to return to Cloud Recesses on time, Lan Sizhui takes matters into his own hands. </blockquote> ➤ fic from sizhui's pov, but lots about how/why it makes sense for wwx to keep traveling post canon

<blockquote>When Xiu Ya comes for him again, Luo Binghe holds still for the blade. He hadn't dodged before, thinking Shen Qingqiu wouldn't really do it. He won't dodge now, thinking that he deserves it. He knows that he's dreaming, anyway — he might as well let the memory go on.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Beside her, the second clarinet shifted in his seat and grumbled, “I thought there was going to be a new conductor. What’s the point of holding rehearsal without a conductor?” The complaint lit the first clarinet’s seething anger. He should shut his mouth and tune his clarinet. Yes, the new conductor was late, but the ensemble had all gathered, when, for too long, they hadn’t known if they would ever gather again. Two weeks at home, with nothing but shrieking children and her mother and sister-in-laws’ chorus of laments—oh our menfolk, oh the senate, oh the drought—was enough. She needed this. Didn’t they all, right now? They would have an ordinary rehearsal if she had to drag each one through it by their nose.</blockquote> ➤ Oh wow this is gorgeous, intense and beautiful and real, and the slow careful building towards the perfect end

<blockquote>One day in Lanling, a little blind beggar picks Nie Huaisang’s pocket, which is the most interesting thing to happen to him in months. (AKA the one where Nie Huaisang adopts A-Qing.)</blockquote>

<blockquote>It had been shaping up to be a really lovely party, and honestly, quite a nice cultivation conference in general. Instead, his last surviving brother was exchanging polite bows with Jin Rulan, and Nie Huaisang was going to spend four days on edge.</blockquote> ➤ (JGY is a character in absentia, not actually present in this fic) ➤ augh (complimentary)

<blockquote>And my back is aching, my belt's too tight / I brought a chisel tip to this pencil fight</blockquote>