LINKDING

Summary: “It started with the ghost,” Horatio said after a moment, clearly coming to a decision. He looked upset, finally, but in a frustrated way, not in the way you would expect from someone who had just witnessed four people die, and one of them in his arms. “I got roped into it because of the ghost.” // Why Hamlet chose to put his trust in Horatio. ➜ yuletide fic - for Hamlet ➜ taking an interpretation that Horatio and Hamlet barely knew each other before the start of the play, and running with it from Horatio's pov ➜ I love the way this interpretation shapes the story! ➜ And Horatio's pov is so good. the way he feels helplessly drawn into the mess by Hamlet's charisma, never sure what he can do or what he should do, but unable to make himself step back and leave Hamlet alone ➜ because Hamlet IS so charismatic, and so visibly struggling at the same time! and there's so much depth there that Horatio simply cannot have the context to understand, but he wants to, he wants to be there for Hamlet ➜ but in the end, of course, all he can do is tell everyone what happened. ➜ I'm so emotions!!!! ➜ 9k words

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>“If you died,” Huaisang started, not knowing quite where he was going with this. “I mean, you did die, da-ge, but if someone had killed you… what would you want to happen next?” / In the wake of Nie Mingjue’s death, Nie Huaisang realises how much he’s been left in ignorance. How could the artsy little brother be left to run their ancestral asteroid-mining clan? What other secrets are hidden in his san-ge’s past? And how should he get revenge? Maybe having da-ge’s personality backed up on a server was supposed to help with all this. Maybe.</blockquote> ➤ mdzs space au about nie huaisang and his years-long project in avenging his da-ge ➤ a repeated theme throughout the fic is nhs visiting and talking to back-ups that had been taken of nmj's personality before death, and the way that this makes literal how HAUNTED nhs is by his brother's absence is just sooooooo good ➤ the worldbuilding is great, the things that are changed from canon due to this different context are great, the anguish and monofocus of nhs are great ➤ I AM ALL EMOTIONS ;_; ➤ 8k words in length

Summary: <blockquote>all I really want is some peace, man</blockquote> ➤ author's note: "doomed best friends who understand each other so deeply" ➤ an Untamed vid about Wei Wuxian & Wen Qing ➤ ahhhhhh I have SO MANY feels about them and this vid GETS them ➤ ouchy in the best way ➤ audio is solely the music ➤ no subtitles ➤ 4:41 in length ➤ thanks to lesbianwangyibo for the rec!

Summary: <blockquote>Wei Wuxian & Jin Guangyao as narrative mirrors.</blockquote> ➤ the bit it says about how people often talk about how lwj and lxc both put all their love and trust into one man, and only one of them was right to - but actually before his resurrection wwx ALSO causes a lot of death and harm to loved ones

Summary: <blockquote>The slow purpling of the evening sky makes their robes blend into their shadows, their shadows blend into the still water stretched out before them. Home, Jiang Cheng thinks, satisfied, and A-Ling exhales softly against him, and everything is good, and none of them move to leave.</blockquote>

<blockquote>“Who are you?” Wei Wuxian asks finally. Sizhui takes a deep breath. This is it. He isn’t ready. But he is. Er-ge said so. He lets his eyes fill with tears and spill down his cheeks. Wei Wuxian leans away, probably unconsciously. Good, Sizhui thinks, a little viciously. He never promised Er-ge to tell Wei Wuxian the truth, but he has never had a better weapon at hand than exactly this. “My name is Nie Sizhui,” Sizhui says. “I’m the master of the Unclean Realm, now.”</blockquote>

<blockquote>Hua Cheng dreams of a dark coffin.</blockquote> ➤ perfect remix of "this slumber that creeps to me"

<blockquote>In the three-layered coffin in Yong'An, Xie Lian dreams.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Raleigh “Rally” King was Axial Conglomerate’s sweetheart. Redrender’s knight in shining armor. You’d watched him sweat in high definition all through season twenty-seven’s desert sequence, his sword gleaming in the sunlight. You’d watched him cry too—big tears rolling down his cheeks whenever someone died and he couldn’t save them. At the time, you’d rolled your eyes. Audiences love sentiment, so of course Rally would cry. The drones are always watching-cutting-streaming the tastiest morsels of Redrender for everyone at home. He’s faking it. It’s acting. You know better now, after eight seasons as a cast member on Redrender. The show gets inside your head. You can think you’re going to treat it like a game all through the psychological profiling and the camera tests. You can tell yourself it’s just reality television while signing away the rights to your DNA samples and signing the contract that agrees that termination is at the studio’s discretion. You can pretend it’s all fake until you’re shipping down to Redrender and then it’s not a game anymore. It’s your life.</blockquote> ➤ it's about an intense and important relationship of trust (platonic or not? not relevant) where they can't actually know each other in any real way because they're always having to play for the cameras! ambiguous ending but good

<blockquote>[All of the Wens die and the world calls it justice. The Yiling Patriarch dies and the world rejoices. His soul responds to neither summoning nor Inquiry. A shattered soul, not enough to linger. The war is finally over—history rewritten. And Lan Huan wants to retch as he watches the ghost of a Wen boy follow his brother into the Cloud Recesses.] Or: A-Yuan in the Cloud Recesses for thirteen years as a ghost.</blockquote>

<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>Yue Qingyuan knows he is seen as an able negotiator, a skilled leader, someone who accomplishes any task set before him, no matter how impossible. He does not feel it now, as his two greatest failures sit before him.</blockquote>

<blockquote>“I know what you’re thinking,” he insisted, “and you’re a fucking idiot. You think it’s not fair that I have a core and you don’t. You think your life has been hard. You think the worst possible thing has happened to you.” He knew it was true, because he remembered thinking that. He’d lain in bed for days like a fool, believing that nothing could be worse than losing every hope of cultivation. “You hate seeing me because I have something that you don’t, and I —” he choked on the words. “You have no fucking idea.” The other Jiang Cheng’s face grew more and more contemptuous as he talked. “You’re wrong,” he said icily. “I don’t want a single thing you have. Not at the price you paid.” --- Jiang Cheng and Wei Wuxian find themselves in a world where things went differently.</blockquote>

<blockquote>“Sir Su, I believe I have been given a certain drug. My mother sent a message warning me of it. It could have been placed in my food or drink at any time in the last two days; its initial action is slow. She said I would know when it began, and advised me to keep only company I could trust for the hours it lasted.”</blockquote> ➤ failed sex pollen

<blockquote>During the unbearable years of tyranny, the political prisoners of the Anchorite Hegemony made a solemn covenant: when the time came, they would cross the last miles to freedom on their feet. For reasons of youth and idiocy, Tishrel thought he would have a choice in the matter. The doors of his cell would open, and rather than flee into the sky, he would make the journey as he had made his way through the years in captivity: with what dignity he could, one foot after another.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Lan Xichen closes his eyes and holds the rules in his chest. He is a pond, slow-moving and lined with cattails, bending around rocks and honoring dams. He knows a limit of grass and beach and stone, knows how far he can lap over their edges. He does not dry up, he does not flood. He takes rain and spills, branches, gravel--he glints sunlight at his surface, and pulls ugly things down below the coating of his silt. / A study of Lan Xichen's year in seclusion.</blockquote> ➤ internal screaming

<blockquote>You are waiting for your instance in the basement of the Shinsegae Department Store. This was as good as an amusement park when you were a kid; it was a wonderland of delicious food stalls and a typical weekend haunt because your grandfather lived two blocks away. Your grandfather is dead. Your instance gave you the news: a phone call in the dead of night that woke you from a dead sleep. “Hello?” you said, accented with slumber. “Is this Soyoung Kang?” your own voice said, accented with Korean. “Yes,” you said. The only people who still call you Soyoung are family. Everyone else calls you Rose.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Iyara taps the military implant behind her ear, and low static greets her. It’s been dead for years—a two-way line with only one connection—but the static is comforting, as if she’s listening to the sound of space itself. Empty with longing. Below her, the dealership is an orange, domed pimple on the otherwise placid blue world. Lights flash through the thin ozone advertising: “Cheap!” “Arturo-433 Models Used and New!” “Xanthian credits accepted!”</blockquote>

<blockquote>After three years of planning, the young Lan brothers play Inquiry for their mother. Unfortunately Inquiry compels answers and prohibits lying, and Madam Lan had plenty of secrets.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Joy in the suffering of others was the first habit Apolek broke me of, sparing me a couple hundred hours in a Pavlov Box in the process. Class enemies saw us coming and attacked, or begged, or burst into tears, but I no longer singled them out for special brutality. “Lenin says we need to punish the parasites,” I had said, the first day I was assigned to Apolek’s detail, when he urged restraint. “Not with violence,” he had said. “Not with cruelty.”</blockquote> ➤ Does a remarkably good job of putting the reader into the mindset of focus on Apolek

<blockquote>The woman whom I sometimes believed to be my mother flickered. Once. Twice. Her face—smiling—froze in a cloud of pixels, while her arm—the wide, emphatic gestures that were as much a marker of her identity as the color of her eyes or her fingerprints—swept the screen, leaving blue eddies, whirlpools of information. Then silence, but her mouth moved, leaving a flesh-colored smudge across the top half of her head. “You’ve cut out again,” I said. The picture reset. She was saying something that made her laugh.</blockquote>

<blockquote>I was actually born on Earth, not far above sea level, in the Greater Kolkata Megapolis. My parents gave me away to the Government of India when I was still a small child, in exchange for enough money for them to live off frugally for a year—an unimaginable amount of wealth for two Dalit street-dwellers who scraped shit out of sewers for a living, and scavenged garbage for recycling—sewers sagging with centuries worth of shit, garbage heaps like mountains. There was another child I played with the most in our slum. The government took her as well. Of the few memories I have left of those early days on Earth, the ones of us playing are clearest, more than the ones of my parents, because they weren’t around much. But she was always there. She’d bring me hot jalebis snatched from the hands of hapless pedestrians, her hands covered in syrup, and we’d share them. We used to climb and run along the huge sea wall that holds back the rising Bay of Bengal, and spit in the churning sea. I haven’t seen the sea since, except from space—that roiling mass of water feels like a dream. So do those days, with the child who would become the soldier most often by my side. The government told our parents that they would cleanse us of our names, our untouchability, give us a chance to lead noble lives as astral defenders of the Republic of India. Of course they gave us away. I don’t blame them. Aditi never blamed hers, either. That was the name my friend was given by the Army. You’ve met her. We were told our new names before training even began. Single-names, always. Usually from the Mahabharata or Ramayana, we realized later. I don’t remember the name my parents gave me. I never asked Aditi if she remembered hers.</blockquote>

<blockquote>You’re looking down—a camera is looking down—at a man labeled Joseph Meyer (Dad). You already knew that. Born 1992, Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania, currently residing in California. There’s a photograph attached to the label, but it’s wrong. It’s younger and skinnier and it has a beard. Both men are your father, but you don’t recognize either of them. “—So, this is how it’s going to be?—” Your father. You don’t recognize your own father. You? How do you know? Wait. You? No! You have to stop looping. You have to figure out what to do.</blockquote> ➤ about abuse

<blockquote>When I finally went in she had cleared the table and pulled the carpetbag out from under the bed. It was grey with dust; even before Da died Mam and I weren’t supposed to touch it, though I used to open it when no one was looking. It’s the past, Da would say when I asked him about it. From when we thought we knew better than God. We came here to get away from that. The way Mam was laying things out, I knew I wasn’t the only one who had peeked inside. She didn’t even have to look, just put out the candles and the fancy drawings, and even the vials that I liked best. In your hand the stuff inside looked black, but when you held them up to the light you saw that it was really a dark, sweet red. Beside these Mam put a knife I had never seen before, with a thick handle and two round blades folded up like a flower. “I’ll show him,” she said. “I’ll show him my god-damned claim.”</blockquote> ➤ awful and ouchy and well-written and intense

<blockquote>When Sylvie was eight years old, she became very sick. Her parents, too, became very sick. And while Sylvie burned in fever dreams, her parents died. When she could move again, when she had stopped crying and wiping her dripping nose, Sylvie dragged her parents to the back of their small wooden home and laid them out on the ground. She found a trowel in the dried-grass basket near the hearth, and with that trowel she buried her parents. On her ninth birthday, Sylvie was alone.</blockquote> ➤ the one with the carnivorous magic carrot

➤ a woman tries to search for alternate universes where her daughter is happy

<blockquote>The yarn baby lasted a good month, emitting dry, cotton-soft gurgles and pooping little balls of lint, before Ogechi snagged its thigh on a nail and it unravelled as she continued walking, mistaking its little huffs for the beginnings of hunger, not the cries of an infant being undone. By the time she noticed, it was too late, the leg a tangle of fibre, and she pulled the string the rest of the way to end it, rather than have the infant grow up maimed. If she was to mother a child, to mute and subdue and fold away parts of herself, the child had to be perfect.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Barely a sliver of skin was left exposed to the sun’s glare, but there was a whisper in the back of her mind that it didn’t really matter anymore. It didn’t matter if she had soft and beautiful skin, because the God in the Pit had made his decision and never unmade them. Yet, Reva kept reminding herself, he hadn’t unmade one yet. The God in the Pit was different from the spirits who swirled through the sands or pulled the sun along its groove in the sky. He was more like a man. He needed wives, and Reva knew that meant he had a body. She and Brete and the other girls had discussed it often enough in the night.</blockquote>

<blockquote>My mother had daughters year after year, and one by one, my father devoured us. There were only three names allowed in the family, and only three children. There was the oldest, who was always Ruth, and the middle child, who was always Susan. The youngest was “the baby” or simply Baby. When a new daughter was born, she became the baby. The former baby became Susan, and Susan became Ruth—and Ruth vanished. Telling the story like this, it sounds as if we knew what was happening. We did not. I am telling you this so that it will not be a shock to you, the way that it was to me.</blockquote> ➤ gosh. wow. this is really good.