LINKDING

<blockquote>Four times Han definitely didn’t need anybody’s help, and one time maybe he did.</blockquote>

<blockquote>The king had already enslaved two grinders for failing him. I didn’t want to be the third. Sitting in the best room of the grinders’ workshop, I rubbed the almost-finished hematite mirror over and over with a grindstone of fired clay, specially tempered for polishing. The king stood behind me, his gaze burning the back of my neck. Sweat beaded in my hair, between my elbows, under my knees. With a word, he could doom me to a lifetime of hard labor and rip me away from everyone I loved. I kept polishing.</blockquote> ➤ I really liked this one

<blockquote>A Staryk girl with a Jewish name</blockquote> ➤ YESSSSSSSS this is so good

<blockquote>A detective is called to a space station to solve the mystery of whether--and how--twelve astronauts are accessing the surface of a forbidden planet.</blockquote> ➤ oh gosh oh gosh oh gosh this is INCREDIBLE

<blockquote>Leia dreams of a beautiful woman with long curly hair. Sometimes, she's smiling brightly, and sometimes, she's sad, but Leia knows, deep in her heart, that this is her birth mother, and that she loves Leia very much.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Tabitha walks, and thinks of shoes. She has been thinking about shoes for a very long time: the length of three and a half pairs, to be precise, though it’s hard to reckon in iron. Easier to reckon how many pairs are left: of the seven she set out with, three remain, strapped securely against the outside of the pack she carries, weighing it down. The seasons won’t keep still, slip past her with the landscape, so she can’t say for certain whether a year of walking wears out a sole, but it seems about right. She always means to count the steps, starting with the next pair, but it’s easy to get distracted. She thinks about shoes because she cannot move forward otherwise: each iron strap cuts, rubs, bruises, blisters, and her pain fuels their ability to cross rivers, mountains, airy breaches between cliffs. She must move forward, or the shoes will never be worn down. The shoes must be worn down.</blockquote> ➤ In which the heroines of two fairy tales help each other recognize how terribly she's been treated and run away together. Plausibly-deniable femslash, I think, though maybe the author meant it as gen

<blockquote>'Cause you know I love the players, and you love the game.</blockquote> ➤ Doctor and companions

<blockquote>The only traces of the future Vetinari were the nose, the hands, and the stillness. (Young Vetinari with Sam Vimes as John Keel, from Night Watch.)</blockquote> ➤ OH NO this is great ➤ (note extra snippet from older Vetinari's pov in comments)

<blockquote>How Anna Newland made herself at home in Chicago.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Bandits came for Lalasa’s family and burned the whole farm out, except for her, because she had been at the river washing clothes. Lalasa did not miss her father or her brothers for all the long years of her life, which should tell you something about her. She cried for them anyway, and that should tell you something too. -- Retelling of Page and Squire from Lalasa's POV.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Lien would like to return to her egg now.</blockquote> ➤ Lien's hatching and childhood

<blockquote>"The king is dead," says Samuels. "Long live the king." A story about fealty and destiny, spies and secrets, and the things we do to hold onto power.</blockquote> ➤ okay this one actually is as good as frostfire's fic, though in different ways. I'll probably still reread frostfire's fic more often though because it's shorter

<blockquote>“What is taquitos,” she asks her house, carefully, in its tongue.</blockquote> ➤ this is SO GOOD

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

<blockquote>They got to know each other very well very quickly, but over the course of their marriage, there were some things she kept to herself.</blockquote> ➤ RLY GOOD Padme-centric fic

<blockquote>In which what was meant to be a silly fic about Luke's farmboy water obsession turned into a story about grief, mourning, culture shock and friendship.</blockquote>

<blockquote>For a moment, Luke's half-amused at himself, for misunderstanding such a simple question, one that's asked all the time on the homesteads - who are your people, where are you from? / On Yavin Four, after the Death Star, before the battle, out of the ashes, Luke Skywalker becomes a Rebel pilot.</blockquote> ➤ Luke is asked about his next-of-kin

<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>Rey is XO of a piece of junk, her captain is a foul-mouthed Wookiee who doesn’t respect people who respect authority, and there are pictures of naked people glued to the ceiling of the Falcon. She honestly couldn't be more thrilled.</blockquote> ➤ soooo apparently this fic is EVERYTHING I NEVER KNEW I WANTED after the movie. goddamn.

<blockquote>A young Alderaanian girl sees a princess on Bespin</blockquote> ➤ on cloud city

<blockquote>Poe guesses he’s a little fucked-up now, more than before. He certainly has a lot of nightmares. He tries to take it in stride. It doesn’t really surprise him. What had he expected? (Dead, he thinks. You expected to be dead.)</blockquote>

<blockquote>Journeymen journey, and Menolly must prove to herself and to Pern that she is worthy of wearing Harper Blue. Accompanied by Sebell, she undertakes her first journeywoman’s assignment to perform at a Ruathan Gather.</blockquote> ➤ WELL I clearly still have a lot of feelings about Pern, because I was crying by the end of this fic. (no, it's not a sad ending!)

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

<blockquote>Do you know what it is like, she would say, to be twenty-nine years old and trapped in your childhood room? No, the curse came before and after the dancing, not during. The curse was a locked door every night; the curse was a father who would sell his daughters for an answer; the curse was a choice between strange men’s lives and our own freedom. The curse was a soldier who would barter a stolen secret for a kingdom, for my body in his marriage-bed.</blockquote> ➤ the stories of each of the 12 dancing princesses. WHAT A GOOD

<blockquote>Most people who have reached their eighties without raising children have every right to believe that they will go on not raising them, and Judith and I were no different until the day they turned up with the social worker, neatly scrubbed and pressed inside their vac-suits and carrying cases with all their remaining worldly possessions. There were three of them like stairsteps, their black hair cut in fringes across their foreheads and their dark eyes shining out disconcertingly familiar at me. But it wasn’t until the social worker said, “Mr. Chao and Ms. Goldstein, these are your grandchildren, Enid, Richard, and Harry,” that I remembered, sheepishly, about the genes we had given all those years ago, to that nice couple from New New Prague, before they left for the Oort Cloud.</blockquote>

<blockquote>For her twelfth birthday, Júlia received two gifts from her mother: a songbird and a dagger.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Before Seam technology, all we could do with the excruciating clarity of hindsight was fix systems errors and try not to make the same mistake twice. We could save people in our present, and we could save people in the future. Now we can save people in the past, too.</blockquote>

<blockquote>In 1830, Cosette buys a fan, and has a short conversation about mothers and motherlands. In 1833, she tries to buy another.</blockquote>

<blockquote>In the wake of the Narada Incident, Number One tries to prevent war from breaking out on the edge of the Neutral Zone, and Jennifer Colt tries to survive her assignment as Admiral Pike's new assistant.</blockquote> ➤ genfic about a female character dealing with grief/loss, it's like this fic was meant for me

<blockquote>Julia and Romeo and Tybalt have been feeling their way cautiously around something new and strange since Tybalt came to Mantua; what finally sparks the tinder none of them could have expected. (Set in an assumed fix-it universe in which nobody dies, Tybalt fled Verona and has been trying to mend his relationship with Julia, and Romeo and Tybalt are already sleeping together but Julia and Tybalt are talking around the elephant in the room. One of these days I'll actually properly write a whole fix-it, I swear.)</blockquote> ➤ YES GOOD