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

<blockquote>From Aaron shall Moses' voice speak, as from Moses mine. Or: ...if Schoenberg wrote Bible crack!AU fanfic instead of an opera, and put all his philosophical kinks in it...</blockquote>

<blockquote>Aral breaks an oath he made to Simon.</blockquote> ➤ or: on consent issues. (in an entirely nonsexual context.)

<blockquote>And having just said all of that about Susan, upon having given the matter far too much thought, the real Problem of Susan, to my mind, had nothing to do with her family dying. It sucks a lot, but it happens and people can die without God Specifically Being Out To Get You. People cope with that and move on all the time, and we feel for them, but they do not get recorded as one of the Great Literary Injustices. No, what I started thinking was that I’m thirty-five. I love my life. I have work I care about and a man I am quite desperately in love with. And if I suddenly fell through a wardrobe and was eleven years old again, I would go so batshit insane that they would have to make up new words for how insane I had gone. I expect I might have a hard time playing nice with the god responsible. So, y’know. (I realize that half my short stories turn up as “Point of view of the woman in this otherwise well-known story” and beg forgiveness in advance.) This one may even qualify as fan-fic! I make you a gift of it, although if my plane goes down in the Atlantic, please remember me for Digger and the Little Red Riding Hood thing instead.</blockquote>

<blockquote>When Cottia arrives in Calleva, her Aunt Valaria means to remake her into a Roman maiden. Cottia does not approve of this plan, but she may not be able to resist.</blockquote>

<blockquote>All hillmen are traitors, and you always knew this.</blockquote> ➤ Or: giving Alex charaterization and motivation and backstory and a sympathetic viewpoint

<blockquote>Child Ballad 32 is a loathly lady story. The only popular version I know of is Steeleye Span’s “King Henry,” on Below the Salt. I have had this album for well over a decade, and occasionally I found myself wondering about the monstrous lady in the story, and even more about King Henry, who agreed to kill his horse and hawk and hounds to feed her. I don’t know that I’d easily forgive someone who forced me to kill my dog. This had been kicking around in my head for the better part of a decade, and then I was privy to a very odd conversation in a bookstore about people with extreme forms of body dysmorphic disorder, and then I drank a lot of coffee and drove for about forty-five minutes and “King Henry” came on the CD player and I went home and wrote the story in one long jag, which probably explains a few things about it.</blockquote>

➤ on issues of race in the movies author's note: "This isn't really fic, it's stupid meta speculation disguised as fic"

<blockquote>Sometimes, Leonard McCoy wonders what his life would have been like in another life. Sometimes, he's pretty sure he doesn't want to know.</blockquote>