Arctic Light

Before I get into the recs, I got another gift in Yuletide Madness, a Chalion one this time, Desdemona's Holiday, with a very sweet look at post-canon Adelis + Penric's family and hints of a bigger plot. I really enjoyed it, and see also my other gift recs in yesterday's post.


Biggles

Okay, so basically everything in the Biggles tag is excellent and if you're into the fandom at all, you'll probably enjoy all of it! There's adorable fluffy Christmas fic, hurt/comfort, sex pollen, casefic, get-together fic - a very nice haul.


Cadfael Chronicles

Christmas Rose (3800 wds, gen)
Casefic with an extremely good canon voice, an interesting mystery, and a sweet frame story with Cadfael and Hugh.


Cass Neary

East Side Drowning (1000 wds, gen)
I read this with no knowledge of canon and really enjoyed it - an atmospheric, haunting, horror-ish look at the New York underbelly in the 1970s.


Chalion

The Inverted Chord (8700 wds, gen, Adelis + Penric + Nikys + Desdemona)
A well-done casefic set shortly after Penric and Nikys's marriage in which Adelis and Penric (& co.) try to track down a runaway while learning to deal with each other.


Chronicles of Chrestomanci

Gently Rise and Softly Fall (1700 wds, Tacroy/Rosalie-ish but mostly gen)
Tacroy and the others in the aftermath of his betrayal. Really gentle and sweet with excellent appearances by a number of characters.


From Eroica With Love

The Nuclear Option (12K, Dorian/Klaus)
Sweet, funny, and low-key hurt/comforty slow-burn get-together fic in which they're fake-dating at Klaus's family estate. Absolutely delightful.


Gattaca

Ulysses and Ozymandias in the Labyrinth (1300 wds, Vincent/Jerome)
A really lovely/painful look at them in a series of interstitial moments in canon. I love how this hints at the crash course to disaster that Jerome is on while also dealing with the way that they both lift each other up.


Get Smart

High Time (1200 wds, gen)
A very funny casefic that absolutely captures the batshit nature of canon, with lots of excellent lines.

I hope the day is treating you well! I am thrilled and delighted with my absolutely lovely gifts! They are all wonderful and exactly what I wanted. ♥

Fluffy (Iron Fist, Ward & Danny & Colleen, 4800 wds)
Ward gets turned into a kitten. This is EVERYTHING the premise promises, completely adorable with delightful banter and perfectly cat-accurate behavior (hiding under things! managing to hide in a room with nowhere to hide! will only let you pet them when you're not looking at them!) that is also somehow Ward-accurate behavior.

Two Men, a Baby, and a Magic Sword (Iron Fist, Danny & Ward & Ward's baby, 2000 wds)
Babysitting shenanigans, Ward trying hard to be a good dad, and a terminally cute dose of these two being cute with a baby. ♥

One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer (Defenders team, Jessica POV)
Teamy and gently angsty aftermath to a mission that didn't quite go as planned, with a great Jessica voice and a perfect touch of h/c.

I have also gotten lovely comments from all but one of the people I wrote for, and I am sipping a cup of gift tea right now. (Most of my family knows to give me tea. It's great.) I hope that you are having a nice day, whatever this day is for you.

Man, the Imperial Radch fandom lucked out this year. It's not even one of my regular reading fandoms, but there's a bunch of long fic and it's all really good!

My favorite of the Imperial Radch fic I've read so far was this:

Every Sundown (10K wds)
This is a roleswap AU in which Breq is the displaced human 1000 years from her own time and Seivarden is a ship. However, since they are still basically themselves as of when we met them in canon, Breq is a rebel fighting the Empire and Seivarden is a derelict ship who lost her crew and has been drifting in space for who knows how long and basically went nuts, spending all her time gazing at nebulas 24/7 and stringing out her one remaining ancillary on painkillers. The characterization in their new roles and resulting changes in their dynamic and power balance are really well done. I loved this.

Other fic I enjoyed in that fandom:

Murderbot's Accidental Exchange Program (8600 wds, Imperial Radch/Murderbot crossover)
I imagine readers who are more into the Murderbot books than I am will get more out of this, but I still really loved the culture clash, general plot, and dry narrative tone.

Every Chambered Cell (6300 wds)
Breq and Seivarden on a mission. I loved the Seivarden narrative voice, sarcastic and funny and occasionally heartbreaking, and the plot was very iddishly satisfying for me.

Longing (11K wds)
Post-canon relationship-building in which Ship uses Seivarden as an ancillary-substitute/meat-puppet to have a relationship with Breq, and Seivarden goes along with it because, well, Seivarden. Shameless idficcy woobification? Sure, but it's well characterized and I ate it up with a spoon.

Other fandoms:

je suis un nous (Ben January, 1500 wds, canon pairings with a poly-ish vibe)
The main set of characters meet pre-canon in a Sense8-style telepathic cluster. I haven't seen Sense8 so I only know of it via fandom osmosis, but I really loved this; it was great to get their reactions to each other before they all met in canon, and I am always down with various takes on soulbonding.

in good hands (Justified, 3500 wds, casefic, Raylan & Tim & Rachel)
This was absolutely hilarious and also suspenseful and well plotted with great character voices. Totally reads like an episode.

Who Comes and Never Leaves (Justified, 3500 wds, Rachel & Tim with brief appearances by others)
This is a great look at Rachel and Tim's friendship and their outside POV on the general wtfery that Raylan has brought into their lives.

Not-so-Silent Night (Nimona, 3000 wds, Ballister/Ambrosius, but mostly Ambrosius & Nimona)
Ballister's two favorite people, who are also each other's least favorite people, team up to rescue him. Really fun and sweet.

Bird's Eye View (Daredevil comics, 1500 words, Matt & Foggy)
A sweet friendship scene, post secret identity reveal.

All the Trollhunters fic in Yuletide this year is really good and worth reading, but this was the one I liked enough to bookmark:

Still Life (Trollhunters, 1500 wds, Barbara/Strickler)
Sweet post-canon putting-their-relationship-back-together fic.

And if none of the above things apply to you, I hope you're having a good Tuesday!

I am thrilled beyond belief by my Yuletide gifts, of which I got three!

We'll Have To Muddle Through Somehow (Iron Fist, 3500 wds, Ward & Danny & Colleen)
This is set after season 1, so no season 2 spoilers, and it is the Iron Fist Christmas fic of my DREAMS. It's wonderfully characterized, beautifully written, sweet and fun with the perfect sharp/sad undertone for Ward, and just very, very them - a fic about three people slowly feeling their way to a better tomorrow and trying to figure out what it means to be a family.

collision course (Alliance-Union, 1400 wds, Meg/Sal/Ben/Dekker)
Gorgeously written, canon-perfect futurefic in which they are on a DIPLOMATIC MISSION TO CYTEEN and it is exactly as amazing as you would expect from that summary. I want 20K of this future.

The Gang Gets Doppled (Death Gate, 3800 wds, Alfred/Haplo/Marit, post-canon)
I've asked for Death Gate before and was over the moon that someone finally wrote it for me! This is a fandom that has next to no fic that's funny and light and cracky, so this was a delightfully sweet and fun surprise! Full of playfulness, banter, and moments that made me smile.

Thank you so much to my writers for writing me such lovely gifts! GO READ THEM! Now I'm off to dive into the rest of the archive. :D

Stories read and adored so far:

Civilized Indecency (Fly by Night, by Frances Hardinge) - OMG, I love these books SO MUCH, and there are TWO STORIES for them this year! The first review for this story says "it's like you wrote a whole Frances Hardinge book in two thousand words!" and this is SO VERY TRUE! It's spot-on perfect Mosca and Clent, and the books' particular blend of very serious moral dilemmas and absurd con-artist hijinks is captured perfectly here.

Forging Ethics - It's a Fly By Night/Inception fusion, which is such an utterly incongruous blend of fandoms that I can't believe it works, yet it does! And there is pitch-perfect Mosca & Clent doing that banter/bicker/talking-past-each-other thing they do, plus really neat glimpses of AU worldbuilding (the Dreamcatchers!).

Dream of Drowning, and Wake in Snow (Rusalka/Russian Stories by CJ Cherryh) - *squeaks* It's h/c with Sasha and Eveshka and Pyetr! MY HEART! ♥ The author has got the book's voice down perfectly, and the characters are portrayed in a sort of not-quite-threesome group-family kind of thing that really works WONDERFULLY for me. (Also, maybe it's just this story, but I never noticed how similar the dynamics in those books - dearly beloved of my childhood - are to White Collar, at least to the fandom dynamic more than the actual show dynamic. It's not specific characters so much as the overall way they relate to each other, but this story really made me think of the way some authors *cough*frith-in-thorns*cough* write Neal & Peter & El.) Beautiful Eveshka POV, and if you like h/c and puppy piles (which I do!), this is so very much the story for you.

Celebration for Three Mages and a Wise Man (Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch) - eeeeeeeee, Rivers of London fic! I adore these books (they have totally tied Dresden Files for my "favorite urban fantasy ever" blue ribbon) and this is glorious - New Year's Eve at the Folly! I just can't even say how perfect it is: Peter and Lesley and Nightingale and Walid and Molly all being so them. (Most of the very limited fic in this fandom focuses on Peter and Nightingale, and it's not that I can't see why - I really do fangirl them hugely, and Nightingale pretty much had me at "hello" - but because I also adore Lesley to pieces, especially in Whispers Under Ground, I was really delighted to see her getting a good part in this story!)

Ghosts of Ettersberg (Rivers of London) - In contrast to the sweet and lighthearted above story, this one is a very serious, painful look at Nightingale's experiences during WWII (please check the warnings at the end if you're concerned it might be triggery for you!), as related to Peter during a sleepless night in the Folly.

There is another, LONG Rivers of London fic which I haven't read yet - I am reading the short ones, and saving the long one for a treat - but I have no doubt that I'm going to adore it when I do. eeeeeee, it's Ficmas! ♥ ♥ ♥

Rondeau (Forever Knight) - This is an absolutely wonderful Amanda Cohen POV that really brings her to life, along with her husband (who is an OC, but is so vivid and wonderful that I desperately wish he was a real character on the show!). It's set at the station Christmas party, so we get very nice glimpses of the other characters too.

Passage (Death Gate Cycle) - DEATH GATE FIC! This is a series of snapshots of Haplo and Alfred at different points in their lives, including post-series. (The fic is labeled Haplo/Alfred, which really isn't my pairing, but as with the Rusalka fic above, it's written in such a way that Haplo's relationship with both Alfred and Marit, post-series, reads in a really interesting group-marriage, gen-or-not-gen sort of way that is very "them" and works really, really well for me.)

Honey Trap (Trixie Belden) - I really enjoyed this look at the kids all grown up. There's a sense of melancholy optimism to this fic that rings very true - the way that none of them have managed to become quite what they wanted to be in the flush of their youthful idealism, but they're all still trying.

That's my first reading frenzy. :D I'm sure there will be more when I have a chance to read more stories!

I guess if I'm going to post any Yuletide recs before the reveals, I had by golly better do a few, huh? I haven't read everything that's on my want-to-read list, but here are a few I liked:

( Recs for Chronicles of Amber, Discworld, Dresden Files, Ex Machina, Lonesome Dove, Vorkosigan Saga, Invisible Man, Red Dwarf, Quantum Leap, Yuu Yuu Hakusho, Zombieland )

'nother batch of recs. I've never really had time around the holidays to actually read more than one or two of the stories while they're still anonymous ... so I'm making the most of it this year! :D

( Fandoms: Invisible Man, True Meaning of Smekday, Shawshank Redemption (book), Dead Like Me, Madeline L'Engle, Quantum Leap, Being Human, Dresden Files )

(Edited to add a few Dresden Files recs to the rest.)

A few recs for Yuletide fics that I've read thus far! Also proof that I am reading in no particular order.

( Recs for Zombieland, Pern, Forever Knight, Julian May's Galactic Milieu books, The Yiddish Policeman's Union, Red Dwarf, Jean Auel's Earth's Children, Back to the Future, Princess Bride )

Also, edited to add: sga_santa has opened up their prompts for anyone to write something for any prompt 'til Jan. 1 - details here!