LINKDING

<blockquote>Nie Huaisang doesn’t expect Lan Xichen to consider him still worth liking after everything he’s done. (He also doesn't want to admit to himself how much he'd love to be proven wrong.) Nie Huaisang had painted, in the dark of night with only the light of a dozen candles and a luminescent pearl, a vast fire-scourged plain. In the midst, offset and growing out of a rocky shelter, he’d added a single shoot of green bamboo, tall and straight despite everything. Balancing the bamboo on the other side of the scroll were two lines of poetry: The grass is burnt but not destroyed by the prairie fires / When spring winds blow they bring it back to life. Rolled up in the painting’s scroll was a note that Nie Huaisang wrote right before committing to sending it. The note, which was even more terrifyingly honest than the painting, read: I will do my best to become worthy once more of being considered your friend.</blockquote> ➤ more kind than many fics about the two of them! and I love the knifey fics but this vision of their future is good too

<blockquote>In which Wei Ying plans his return to the theater world (again) and a-Yuan moves in.</blockquote> ➤ I adore everyone in this fic, I love that everyone gets arcs, either relational or professional, and half the relationship arcs are platonic; and I love how much they all care about each other and support each other in their various ways! (and I love that nhs's arc is about his relationship with himself and his identity?)

<blockquote>Mo Xuanyu thought that this Wei Wuxian person whose body he’d stolen must have been a really interesting person, mostly because he’d been here for three days so far and nobody’d noticed the switch yet.</blockquote> ➤ there's clearly a lot of context missing that mxy doesn't have, and it ends before any of that is resolved, but mxy's little story of accidentally possessing teen wwx's body is still lovely

<blockquote>York, 1997. A schoolteacher reads a peculiar essay on the history of Faerie.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Sandy Nissley was the youngest of five children, and by the time she was ready for high school her father was retired. The Nissleys’ large old early twentieth century duplex at Twenty-Four-Twelve North Second Street had become three bedrooms and a whole storey too big for them, and Sandy’s parents decided to move into something a lot smaller. They weren’t going far, and Sandy would be closer to her school. The change didn’t turn Sandy’s world on its head. But she dreamed about the house she’d grown up in.</blockquote> ➤ about the relationship between a girl and a house

<blockquote>Paula after the events of the movie.</blockquote>

<blockquote>“you have learned love but not self-consciousness, because love does not beget self. there’s no need for heart and body to love; no need for mind or soul though you have both, programmed for one and grew the other like a struggling sprout in a crack on the pavement, just for him, just like him. ” The Passenger and the Computer, in the midst of the all black everything. Time once more has meaning, and humanity must be redefined.</blockquote>

<blockquote>The currents seemed to pull the empty ache out of her, as though her body were just a translucent husk. And then the sound of her heart beating inside her would remind her it was time to surface, and she would feel the slight throbbing of her body asking to live, and reluctantly, made aware again of her natural place above water, she would rise.</blockquote> ➤ about a free-diver in the mediterranean. A lovely story of grief and loss and living, well-grounded in its setting.

<blockquote>Five times Luke brushed Leia's hair.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Obi-Wan didn't become Qui-Gon Jinn's apprentice, and Ben didn't exile himself to Tatooine. On Bandomeer the two meet.</blockquote> ➤ marked as a wip and hasn't updated in a year, but it feels like a good ending place to me so it doesn't read like a wip. ➤ This fic is a lovely look at how being part of the Agricorps instead of the Jedi Order can actually be a /good/ thing

<blockquote>Han Solo blows by, moving fast. "Don't drink the hose water, kid, it's got fertilizer in it." Finn looks up, affronted. "Now you tell me?"</blockquote> ➤ Essie I particularly recommend this fic to you!

<blockquote>"It's so green here," Rey says, wonderingly, the first morning; the first sunrise. "And the clouds! There's just so much color." "Just wait until it's really spring," Luke says. "I know patience is tough at your age—" Without looking, he can feel her tense, irritation scratching at the back of her mind. She's spent her whole life waiting. "Or maybe that was just me," he adds, smiling. </blockquote>

<blockquote>Where you tend a rose a thistle cannot grow.</blockquote>

<blockquote>In his face there is no human pity, no understanding of her pain. If there had been, perhaps she would have hated him less. Elisabeth has sympathy for Death, once, but it's a long journey to get there.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Because the wildness is everywhere, and you cannot ever really escape it.</blockquote> ➤ a retelling of beauty and the beast

<blockquote>There is a tale the young maidens of the kingdom tell, gathered together at the river’s edge, washing clothes against the rocks. It goes this way – once there was a woman who had something taken from her by a foolish, deceitful man. The loss grew within her until it was a thorn in her side, silver and sharp, stealing her breath as fast as she could gasp it. There was only one girl in the entire kingdom with hands small enough to slip between her ribs and pull it free.</blockquote>

<blockquote>The state took Aphra away from Innsmouth. They took her history, her home, her family, her god. They tried to take the sea. Now, years later, when she is just beginning to rebuild a life, an agent of that government intrudes on her life again, with an offer she wishes she could refuse. “The Litany of Earth” is a dark fantasy story inspired by the Lovecraft mythos.</blockquote> ➤ a subversion of Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos ➤ see also Ex Urbe's excellent review of this story: http://www.exurbe.com/?p=2951

<blockquote>The Ivory Sun was brilliant on the day the orphan arrived at the Citadel of Six-and-Twenty Wonders. She had come across a desert and a half, from a small mountain town of no repute, a town with only three moons and no stars at all to speak of. The girl’s name was Rayyana, and she had come to the Citadel to paint.</blockquote>

<blockquote>“Today I looked out,” she reads, “and I saw my name among the stars.”</blockquote> ➤ in which Tosh works on a translation project ➤ also at http://femgenficathon.livejournal.com/77183.html

<blockquote>In Japan, it is not too much to say that everything is about appearances.   It is a habit cultivated over a life-time, and not one easy to break.</blockquote> ➤ a Miko character study ➤ series consists of: Zoh-onna Omote Tadaima ➤ also at https://archiveofourown.org/works/1182813

<blockquote>Raleigh comes home with Mako for O-bon.</blockquote> ➤grief/healing over those they both have lost

<blockquote>Charlie joined Carlos' team hoping to gain some practical experience, contribute to his field, maybe get a paper published. He definitely wasn't expecting...well...Night Vale. (A series of vignettes about everyone's favorite scientific researchers and their handsome leader.)</blockquote>

<blockquote>Sherlock is all at once a gentleman and a villain; unflinchingly reckless and often belligerent, but more than a little kind, too. Behind those shutters he puts up there sits a person who just can’t bear the thought of making a tortoise into soup.</blockquote> ➤ scenes from a life

<blockquote>about a reverse little mermaid, in which the prince’s sister has always dreamed of life under the sea, and then they are in a shipwreck, and as she hangs onto a piece of driftwood, she sees her brother rescued from drowning by a mermaid. Everybody thinks she’s mad, later, after she’s been rescued. But her brother did turn up alive and unharmed on the beach, and she knows what she saw: a girl, beautiful as the dawn, with a fish’s tail, keeping her brother safe above the waves. She grows sick with longing.</blockquote> ➤ lovely and dark

<blockquote>Jehan and Enjolras discuss love and liberty (and gay rights--no, this is not a modern AU).</blockquote>

<blockquote>Elinor remembered the slow drift from humanity to wild animal, like falling asleep listening to music until only the drumbeat remained.</blockquote>

<blockquote>"Oh, my love," said the woman, touching his arm. "Stop seeking to possess me. It will only bring you misery. For a time I will be yours–" "That's not enough," interrupted Ṣalāḥ ad-Dīn. "And for eternity I am yours and his and everyone's."</blockquote>

Once having turned away, forever there shall be no news from my children.

<blockquote>You know all those Betan survey ships that go into wormholes and don’t come out? They go to Narnia</blockquote>