LINKDING

<blockquote>A hapless imugi is determined to attain the form of a full-fledged dragon and gain entry to the gates of heaven. For a long time, things don’t go well. Then, it meets a girl. </blockquote>

<blockquote>I don’t really care about the new guy, even if he did murder someone once. I’m mostly just out here to not have to listen to old Mrs. Francis concern-trolling my mom. When I was a kid who sometimes acted like a boy and sometimes like a girl, it was “just a phase.” Now that I’m sixteen, it’s “worrying” and “not safe for the younger children” and something we should “talk to a therapist about.” What Mrs. Francis doesn’t know is that I remember every life I’ve lived for nearly four hundred years—not in detail, but like a book I read once and have a few hazy recollections about. In over a dozen lifetimes I can recall, I’ve been male and female enough times for those words to mean little more to me than a particular shirt—not who I am.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Here’s how I remember it: A touch shocked me. I was reaching for a flash-seared bog-oyster, and then a fingertip, softer than I’d ever felt, brushed my knuckle. The softness startled me so much, it took me a moment to realize the hand had seven fingers, three more than mine. Be held a striped cloth in ber other hand. I came up with the correct pronoun by instinct, even before my mind took in the fact that a pilot was touching my hand. Holy shit, a pilot!</blockquote> ➤ here for it omg! both the A+ gender/sexuality stuff (wayyyyy more than a binary, though still binarized thinking about who is the penetrator/penetratee in sex, and a main character who doesn't want to fulfill the expectations set out for ym), and the scifi worldbuilding stuff, and the extremely pragmatic approach the main character takes to yr relationship with Dot. ➤ Saw someone refer to this as a/b/o fic before a/b/o was a thing, and yeah, this story does exactly the gender deconstruction things that my fave kinds of a/b/o fics do (although this story never really gets to a place of explicitly criticizing the binarization of penetration roles as a whole, just the main character's discomfort with yr place in that system) ➤ also WAIT this author is the author of that book I keep seeing like everyone talk about (All the birds in the sky)? okay fiiiiiiine I guess I will put that book on my to read list after all