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nine ladies dancing (yuletide gifts!)
Dec. 25th, 2014 11:56 pmhappy yuletide! i've all settled in to wait for the 3am reveals yesterday, and then exactly twenty minutes before my router flat out died, leaving me to much woe and gnashing of teeth and hunching over my phone, trying to get to the stories somehow.
it was so, so worth it because i've gotten not one but two amazing fics this year (and a madness treat coming! i can't wait) and they made almost giddy with joy. sharing!
passager, 3110 words, a falcon fic about laura and niki's first meeting.
so, basically, it was PERFECT. i knew it was going to be perfect ever straight after seeing the tagset (hurt/comfort, dungeons, food porn), but the reality overpassed my wildest dreams. it's has niki at his most tragically pale, tortured (literally) and courteous and moving gracefully sideways to logic and good sense, and laura at her most practically generous, unstoppable, formidable and warm, and it touches on the beginning of their prickly and rock-solid friendship-love, and contains all the things i love, and it's written with obvious, vibrant joy and love for the canon, and i was just happy about it, okay.
Niki blinked up at a black character written in calligraphy on brown silk. Then he blinked again, and saw the woman who had rescued him. She wore a flowing black caftan embroidered with white flowers, and had tamed the wildness of her hair with a twist of silver wire.
Past her, he saw the shape of a ship interior, divided by hydroponics tubes lush with vines and flowers. Copper lamps hung from the tubes, casting a welcoming yellow light.
“I hate to be clichéd…” Niki began.
“You’re on my ship,” she said. “What were you thinking, telling me to leave you alone on yours? You would’ve died.”
“I didn’t want to impose.” He was aware of the absurdity of his words as he spoke them, as well as of their truth.
learning the rules, 1478 words, goblin emperor fic about maia learning to play chess.
tge fic, tge fic, glorious tge fic! everything i love about this canon - maia's fragility, his unflinching valiance in the face of this fragility, complicated balances of power and weakness, desire to belong. the way he's so, so afraid to reach out, and the way he - post-canon, after the whole long exhausting journey of it - still has strenght and conviction to reach out anyway, an the way his people will (always) meet him halfway. in short, so much love.
“The ultimate object of the game,” Csevet was saying, “is to capture the opponent’s emperor.” He glanced up as he spoke, carefully gauging Maia’s reaction, but Maia felt no outrage. “The emperor can only move one space at a time, and so the other pieces must protect him.”
Maia laughed. “A very accurate game, we see.”
Csevet returned his smile hesitantly. “It is older than the Untheileneise Court, and so we are certain that no specific emperor could be meant.”
“Of course.” Maia reached out to touch the emperor piece. It was plainer than many of the other pieces, marked only with a simple, unadorned circle. He felt sympathy for it.
“Shall we play, your Serenity?”
“What, now? We don’t know – we won’t remember all the rules –”
“It doesn’t matter,” Csevet assured him. “Should you forget, simply ask, and we will explain again. But the best way to learn, Serenity, is to play. The rules are all merely complicated abstractions, until you have seen them in action.”
read and share my delight! and i'm now back to reading through the rest of the archive, and possibly also sleeping at some point, but mostly just being happy.
it was so, so worth it because i've gotten not one but two amazing fics this year (and a madness treat coming! i can't wait) and they made almost giddy with joy. sharing!
passager, 3110 words, a falcon fic about laura and niki's first meeting.
so, basically, it was PERFECT. i knew it was going to be perfect ever straight after seeing the tagset (hurt/comfort, dungeons, food porn), but the reality overpassed my wildest dreams. it's has niki at his most tragically pale, tortured (literally) and courteous and moving gracefully sideways to logic and good sense, and laura at her most practically generous, unstoppable, formidable and warm, and it touches on the beginning of their prickly and rock-solid friendship-love, and contains all the things i love, and it's written with obvious, vibrant joy and love for the canon, and i was just happy about it, okay.
Niki blinked up at a black character written in calligraphy on brown silk. Then he blinked again, and saw the woman who had rescued him. She wore a flowing black caftan embroidered with white flowers, and had tamed the wildness of her hair with a twist of silver wire.
Past her, he saw the shape of a ship interior, divided by hydroponics tubes lush with vines and flowers. Copper lamps hung from the tubes, casting a welcoming yellow light.
“I hate to be clichéd…” Niki began.
“You’re on my ship,” she said. “What were you thinking, telling me to leave you alone on yours? You would’ve died.”
“I didn’t want to impose.” He was aware of the absurdity of his words as he spoke them, as well as of their truth.
learning the rules, 1478 words, goblin emperor fic about maia learning to play chess.
tge fic, tge fic, glorious tge fic! everything i love about this canon - maia's fragility, his unflinching valiance in the face of this fragility, complicated balances of power and weakness, desire to belong. the way he's so, so afraid to reach out, and the way he - post-canon, after the whole long exhausting journey of it - still has strenght and conviction to reach out anyway, an the way his people will (always) meet him halfway. in short, so much love.
“The ultimate object of the game,” Csevet was saying, “is to capture the opponent’s emperor.” He glanced up as he spoke, carefully gauging Maia’s reaction, but Maia felt no outrage. “The emperor can only move one space at a time, and so the other pieces must protect him.”
Maia laughed. “A very accurate game, we see.”
Csevet returned his smile hesitantly. “It is older than the Untheileneise Court, and so we are certain that no specific emperor could be meant.”
“Of course.” Maia reached out to touch the emperor piece. It was plainer than many of the other pieces, marked only with a simple, unadorned circle. He felt sympathy for it.
“Shall we play, your Serenity?”
“What, now? We don’t know – we won’t remember all the rules –”
“It doesn’t matter,” Csevet assured him. “Should you forget, simply ask, and we will explain again. But the best way to learn, Serenity, is to play. The rules are all merely complicated abstractions, until you have seen them in action.”
read and share my delight! and i'm now back to reading through the rest of the archive, and possibly also sleeping at some point, but mostly just being happy.