LINKDING

<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>Laurence awakens in 1804 during the moment of Temeraire's hatching. He weighs his knowledge and makes a choice.</blockquote> ➤ oh nooooooooo :(

<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.

<blockquote>Sometimes the effects of head-injuries are not always readily apparent.</blockquote> ➤ okay I think this one might be worse than the one where Temeraire died

<blockquote>They are not so very different, Ariadne and Pasiphaë, Icarus and Daedalus, Ariadne and Icarus.</blockquote>

<blockquote>King's wives; king's sons.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Hannah and Melanie: sisters, apart and together. Weather workers. Time benders. When two people so determined have opposing desires, it’s hard to say who will win—or even what victory might look like. This stunning, haunting short story from rising star Alyssa Wong explores the depth and fierceness of love and the trauma of family.</blockquote> ➤ Timeloop, basically, though it doesn't follow fandom's rules about how they're supposed to go. Which is fine, just disconcerting at first because I've had genre expectations trained into me! ➤ Also: Melanie is super definitely trans, and I love the deft way it's shown without ever saying the word or making a huge deal out of it.

<blockquote>The Force isn't the only kind of power</blockquote> ➤ Leia-centric, post-movie. This fic leaves me wanting to swear at it, in the most complimentary kind of way. HDU give me all these feels, fic!

<blockquote>(Or, a pregnant Diana Maturin, nee Villiers, spends her confinement at Ashgrove Cottage, writes many letters, and sends one.)</blockquote>

<blockquote>Ever since she was a small girl, she has learned to be careful on the hunt, to recognize the signs that separate regular animals from human-cursed grundwirgen. To harm a grundwirgen is a crime punishable by death by the King’s decree – a fatal mistake that her Auntie Rosa and mother have carefully prepared her to avoid. On her fifteenth birthday, when her mother is arrested and made to stand trial for grundwirgen murder, everything she thought she knew about her family and her past comes crashing down.</blockquote>

<blockquote>The only thing worse than being the son of the Butcher of Komarr is being the son of his political officer. [An Eagle/Vorkosigan fusion.]</blockquote>

<blockquote>One cannot beat obedience into a slave who wishes to die.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Gregor feels the world slipping away from him.</blockquote> ➤ the one where Gregor gets time-traveled back to the era of Dorca as emperor. augh!

<blockquote>SHIELD goes down. Pepper Potts deals with the aftermath.</blockquote>

<blockquote>A young Tybalt and Mercutio have an unexpected encounter at a brothel.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Tybalt grows up.</blockquote>

<blockquote>"Ich kam, weil du mich brauchst." Crown Prince Rudolf has one true and faithful friend who remained by his side throughout his life.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Even if Ariel were to want to return to the sea, even if memories of shells and coral overshadow her restless nights, even if she were to look at her children, who speak only of land matters and never of the water -- even then, she cannot.</blockquote>

<blockquote> Jean Valjean realizes that there is yet more that Toulon could take from him. Note: This story contains some offscreen rape of OCs, perceived sexual threat from someone in authority, a brief mention of suicide, internalized homophobia, and the main character spends much of his time dissociated from his surroundings. There is no graphic onscreen rape.</blockquote>

<blockquote>"She'd had the most beautiful imaginable face..."</blockquote>

<blockquote>Grantaire and Eponine get drunk and have sex while roleplaying as Marius and Enjolras, respectively.</blockquote> ➤ damn, how to tag pairings when the sex is one thing but the feelings are other things entirely?

<blockquote>The night after the Gorbeau robbery, Eponine wanders the streets of Paris.</blockquote>

author's summary from tumblr: <blockquote>I wrote a Les Mis fic! It’s sad unrequited E/R, because that’s what this fandom was missing. Also there’s sex in it, sort of.</blockquote>

<blockquote>If circumstance and choice had been different (In short: if the revolution was led by Artemis and not Apollo, if Thénardier’s daughter were more dangerous and less sane, if some had grown up with more money and some with less, if a charming young man had been a little more terrible, after all, and if a drunken Pylades had, accordingly, never been given something to believe in).</blockquote> ➤ WHOOPS so apparently Enjolras being on the other side of the revolution makes me cry??? GOOD TO KNOW

<blockquote>After an encounter with soldiers at their farm leaves Esca unsettled, Marcus dons his old armor and offers himself up.</blockquote>

<blockquote>This is a Five Things Plus One story about ways that Marcus Flavius Aquila and Esca son of Cunoval might have met, and fortunately did not--and one way they did, which went rather better. Basically a set of depressing canon-era AUs plus some happiness.</blockquote>