LINKDING

summary: Disgraced former child star and current struggling street musician Xie Lian sends off an audition tape to a new movie on a wild impulse, and then runs into an interesting man while he's performing. And again that evening, and again the next day. When he's asked to travel to Atlantic City for a table read for the movie, his new friend, Hua Cheng, offers to drive him, and he proceeds to run into a number of old acquaintances (many of whom he didn't realize still considered him a friend), learn a few heart-breaking secrets, and fall absolutely catastrophically in love with a man he's pretty sure is already taken. ➜ tgcf hualian modern au ➜ xie lian is a former child actor who gets by by busking, hua cheng is a mysterious handsome goth he keeps running into, and bai wuxian is the twitter troll who ruined xl's previous career ➜ I love watching hualian's interactions with each other, how much fun they have teasing each other and how much they like each other (and are weird about each other) ➜ lots of secondary characters they have connections to ➜ yin yu as hbomberguy equivalent...this gives me life ➜ charming and fun and exactly what I needed on the day I read it ➜ 19k words

Summary: Yin Yu never expected to wake up again. When he does so as a small ghost fire, he finds himself stuck with Quan Yizhen (who has been nurturing his soul) until he can take on a more stable form and begin his afterlife anew. Or: Yin Yu's mortifying ordeal of being held gently in the hands of someone he convinces himself he hates, but definitely doesn't. If no paths are bound, there might even be healthy communication! ➤ post-canon tgcf fic ➤ yin yu as a ghost fire being protected and cared for by quan yizhen ➤ quanyin learning to see and understand each other a little better ➤ really enjoyed seeing them work towards being able to actually have something good between them again! ➤ 15k words in length ➤ (I do feel that the very ending scene is a bit too facile, but I enjoyed everything up to that point!)

<blockquote>It isn't that Xie Lian isn't afraid of his body, of whether it will do what he wants it to do, feel what he wants it to feel. But he's much more afraid of taking slow careful steps into the unknown than he is of leaping. Or: Xie Lian can, in fact, get it up, often and enthusiastically. Getting off is a little trickier.</blockquote>