"you are my baby, but you don't belong to me / what you become, that is up to you."

The planet of Quányuán is arid to the point of being uninhabitable. Wetness is a concept left back on Earth. That doesn’t stop one elderly woman from stepping outside the safety of the colony whenever she can for the brief opportunity to fully experience the outside world.

“I think this is the one,” Emily said, just as she had said last time, and the time before, and the time before.

(The last time she’d announced that she had the song, it was a treacly Edith Piaf-style torch song about Genghis Khan’s threesome with the Lady of the Lake and Spock from Star Trek, and their adventures conquering the land of glitter cheese.)

Bodhi can't go back, but he's determined to keep moving forward.

Fuckos in this stupid town think nobody notices how when the tide just keeps coming in without going out again that "some" neighborhoods get sunk forever as an "unfortunate side effect of coastal flooding" while others become the sexy hip cool new "seafloor village." I'd cackle every time some bullshit golden-brick seawall crumbles and takes another mansion with it, but now there's straight-up UNDERWATER house tours for a zillion dollars a ticket, the same way they used to show off their giant Christmas trees and shit but even more pretentious cause now I guess they host in designer scuba gear. "Oh, this old thing? Blub blub, there's sand in my butt, no wait it's diamonds, ha ha!" (That's how they talk probably.) MEANWHILE where MY shitty old apartment used to be is now an undersea God-damned HOTEL AND CASINO.

It walks the dark halls of the ship, they say. It is larger than a bilgesnipe, but it is not a bilgesnipe. It is cold as ice. Its claws clatter on the metal decking and leave frost in their wake. Its eyes glow in the dark.

Ava and Zach dig into the blue crate, not yet put away, and select three eggs each. Golden eggs from golden geese in Wisconsin, eggs that remind Ava of crafty Easter displays. Mythique doesn’t use chicken eggs, and Ava doesn’t use any magical ingredients at all until she can prove herself by making a golden omelet just as perfect as she can make with a chicken egg. Until they prove their worth, the new people, she and Zach, are stuck peeling potatoes and washing lettuce.

She’s been trying for two weeks. Zach’s been trying for three.

Pre-Canon AU: On an unexpected holiday to America, Harry Potter meets a strange girl at a zoo, finds out that he's a witch, steals a snake, and is cordially invited to the Addams mansion for dinner.

Or: Harry Potter meets the Addams Family.

I don't believe my will's quite free.

As soon as Aubrey Thyme, psychotherapist, had opened her office door and seen her new client, Anthony J. Crowley, sitting in her waiting area, she was observing and assessing him. At first glance, she paid attention to the following:

--His clothing was expensive and stylish;
--He wore very strange but noticeable cologne;
--His relationship to the seat he occupied could only, very loosely, be described as “sitting;”
--He looked angry;
--He was wearing sunglasses.

What Aubrey Thyme, a professional, thought, upon first seeing her new client was: you’re going to be a fun one, aren’t you?

“You didn’t tell Illyan the truth about your little topple off the balcony, did you.”
[...]
“...how did you know?”
“He doesn’t talk about you with secret terror in his eyes.”
- The Vor Game, Chapter 17

In another timeline, Gregor makes a different choice. (And Miles underestimates Illyan.)

When Illyan begins to suspect something is going wrong with his memory chip, he follows proper procedure and notifies his second-in-command.

Style icons of the galaxy, unite!

“I could have rented a flat right next to the apparition point,” Hermione grumbled as she pulled her wand out of her jeans’ pocket and set about casting warming and drying charms on herself. “It was available! It wasn’t even that much more expensive! But no, this one had a slightly larger bedroom. By a whole three feet!”

“Not to mention we’re surrounded by muggles on all sides so we can’t even risk umbrella charms,” Ginny pointed out. “Unlike if we lived next to, say, the apparition point. For example.”

A story about Ginny feeling anxious about her quidditch career and how it never stops raining.

“And what exactly am I supposed to have done?”

He sighed. “Oh, don’t make me say it,” he said, “it sounds so silly. And, like I just said, I can’t prove it. Sure, I can point out that in the last year, forty-six people, rich and famous and influential people, who’ve had their portraits painted by you have suffered catastrophic strokes, leaving them paralysed and catatonic. But you would then point out, equally truthfully, that sixty-seven equally rich, famous and influential people have also been painted by you and are as fit as fiddles. And then you’d challenge me to tell the jury exactly how you’re supposed to have done these dreadful things, and I’d just shrug and admit I don’t have a clue, beyond basic philosophical and theological theory.”

He was looking past me, at the bookshelf; Pacatian, and Saloninus’s Existence and Reality. I winced. A bit like hanging the murder weapon on your wall, mounted on a little plaque.

Once there was a prince of Ruyastan who was born in secret and hidden behind a false wall with a nurse to hush her and soothe and give suck. The prince and her nurse lived in narrowness for ten years, reading and watching the world through a crack no bigger than a needle. During those years, the dowager queen hunted down and killed, for jealousy, every one of the prince’s half-brothers and cousins, carelessly begotten in cities and villages and forgotten apart from notes in the royal genealogies.

But the prince’s mother had died in giving birth, and the crabbed old genealogists who pried and listened never learned of it. So the prince’s name was never written, and she survived.

Zhou: You can understand this language? The sign?

Subject: Yes, I can understand this sign. It is one of my father’s languages, I have learned it from he, my father, who learned it from [sign unrecognizable], but past that the wake of history is lost.

Zhou: Who was your father?

Subject: My father was. [here she makes the phonetic sign marker, then pauses]

Zhou: Go on.

Subject: It is not his real name.

Zhou: Tell us his real name, then.

Subject: [ejects something wet onto the table]

Luke kills his father and Falls, and Leia becomes the last resort.

Hello, Sacrid Henn.

I’m aware that you’re terrified.

I’m also aware that you are paralyzed, deaf, and blind, your only sensory input being my voice.

It is a voice that has been designed to be as comforting as these circumstances permit. Believe me when I say that you are in no danger and that my intentions toward you are that of a caretaker toward a vulnerable charge.

You’ll smell it before you see it — scents of ticklish pollen, braised roots. The market doesn’t like to let itself be found too easily. I found it by accident nineteen years ago, stumbling from Atgeld Library in that gossamer hour when the sun begins to warm a world still living in night. They tell me the walls between things are thinner at dawn and dusk.

But you, my daughter, needn’t worry about all that. They’re expecting you.

In fleeing the Red Keep, Sansa takes a secret passage through an old wardrobe and winds up somewhere else entirely.

When Sirius turns Peter Pettigrew in, suddenly he’s free. Harry’s more than happy to leave the Dursley’s no matter what living with Sirius Black might be like.

I was actually born on Earth, not far above sea level, in the Greater Kolkata Megapolis. My parents gave me away to the Government of India when I was still a small child, in exchange for enough money for them to live off frugally for a year—an unimaginable amount of wealth for two Dalit street-dwellers who scraped shit out of sewers for a living, and scavenged garbage for recycling—sewers sagging with centuries worth of shit, garbage heaps like mountains. There was another child I played with the most in our slum. The government took her as well. Of the few memories I have left of those early days on Earth, the ones of us playing are clearest, more than the ones of my parents, because they weren’t around much. But she was always there. She’d bring me hot jalebis snatched from the hands of hapless pedestrians, her hands covered in syrup, and we’d share them. We used to climb and run along the huge sea wall that holds back the rising Bay of Bengal, and spit in the churning sea. I haven’t seen the sea since, except from space—that roiling mass of water feels like a dream. So do those days, with the child who would become the soldier most often by my side. The government told our parents that they would cleanse us of our names, our untouchability, give us a chance to lead noble lives as astral defenders of the Republic of India. Of course they gave us away. I don’t blame them. Aditi never blamed hers, either. That was the name my friend was given by the Army. You’ve met her. We were told our new names before training even began. Single-names, always. Usually from the Mahabharata or Ramayana, we realized later. I don’t remember the name my parents gave me. I never asked Aditi if she remembered hers.

I know what Dave wants even before he says it, before I’ve even taken off my stupid work cap or thrown my keys on top of the pile of crap beside the door. He’s taken his head off again, somehow, and I never can figure how he does it with no thumbs or even fingers, and I know my uncle didn’t help, but there it is on the rug waiting for me, Dave’s head, and he opens his gigantic mouth wide and looks at me with his big, brown fake eyes, and says, “Road trip?”

“I’m a senior porter now,” I say. “I can’t just skip work.” This is true.

“I looked at your schedule on the fridge. Your next shift isn’t until Tuesday,” Dave says. This is also true. “So, road trip?”

“You know I can’t leave Uncle Marty alone that long,” I say.

Before the flute is a flute, it is a bird. This is the first act of magic. This is the first lesson the girl learns, when the world is still young and shaggy-coated with lingering winter. Sometimes things can be other things. An axehead hides in a chunk of flint. Before it is a meal, a mammoth is a squealing calf tagging along behind its mother. A fox is a white spirit barking curses until an arrow finds it and turns it into a friend that shields your ears from the wind’s teeth.

And before it is a flute, a bird is a song lodged in a treetop.

I’ve thought of Raleigh and Mako ever since I first started listening to this song. And I finally sat down and did something about it. Not all fights are physical. On a daily basis many of us are fighting our pasts, or fighting aspects of ourselves that would tear us down if we let them.

All the OTHER times Nick Fury texted Carol Danvers.

May 4th, 2012

Get your ASS over here there is an INVASION. Aliens are coming out of the SKY HELP US


May 10th, 2012

"Invasion, Fury, the word you used was invasion! I made it across three quarters of the galaxy in six days! Where are the aliens?"

The war is over and Bodhi Rook has been away from Jedha for too long. It’s time to go home. He winds up with an unexpected passenger.

A love story between two people and a place, about all the different meanings of home.

Rey has a plan. Get to Ahch-To. Find the lightsaber. Get off Ahch-To forever.

This plan is foiled by a group of judgemental fish nuns.

A story of complicated emotions, unimpressed aquatic aliens, and fixing what you can.

Rey never expected that Han and Chewbacca would keep coming back.

Most boys in my position—or rather, most newly-minted young men—choose to discourse upon a familiar subject, such as the origin of our sacred holidays. But as many of you know, my mother is Lady Trent, the dragon naturalist. As such, I find myself drawn instead to a passage from the Book of Priests, on the impurity of dragon-kind.

Thom survives the Coronation Day attack. It's hard to say whether this causes more problems for him or Alanna.

London’s antique enthusiasts and rare lit nerds alike know that if you’re looking for a specific vintage or antique book, you have a good chance of ending up in A.Z. Fell & Co. as a last resort. And if you’ve ever been in (or are currently in) this predicament, you know how much of an absolute nightmare it is trying to even get in the door. Luckily, this handy guide, the fruit of a months-long collaborative effort to create the perfect formula for gaming the A.Z. Fell system, will tell you everything you need to know, complete with a comprehensive breakdown of what, exactly, the opening hours are. Compiled by pageknight and inky of the Rare Antique Forums.

There are only two ways a child can go with a name like Warlock Lovecraft Faustus Dowling, and War had chosen the other one.

It had never been Aziraphale's intention to found a sort of secret society of angry angels. Certainly he'd never imagined he might run a halfway house on Earth for them.

(it's more likely than you think)

Warlock "Lockie" Dowling summons a demon.

Or, he buys a book off a suspiciously familiar bookseller and is convinced into demon summoning.

It goes about as well as you'd expect.

They try to keep me down but I just get higher

Warlock Dowling is over-dramatic, insecure and inclined towards running away, which makes sense since he was primarily raised by a certain over-dramatic demon. After the apocalypse Warlock heads home to England to find his nanny.

“There is the past and the not-past,” Heron said, blood dripping from their arm onto the nightingale floor. “Which is this?”

“The not-past, you idiot.” Dog grunted as he peeled back Heron’s sleeve. He was in Heart of Storms, shoulders tense and eyes alive with lightning. With a tsk, he tore off a clean strip of bandage. “Hold still.”

You’re looking down—a camera is looking down—at a man labeled Joseph Meyer (Dad). You already knew that. Born 1992, Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania, currently residing in California. There’s a photograph attached to the label, but it’s wrong. It’s younger and skinnier and it has a beard. Both men are your father, but you don’t recognize either of them.

“—So, this is how it’s going to be?—”

Your father. You don’t recognize your own father.

You? How do you know? Wait. You?

No! You have to stop looping. You have to figure out what to do.

Who would have thought that they had this much in common?

Mrs. Bennet attempts to husband hunt. Aziraphale attempts to buy a book. No one gets what they want.

There are, as far as Warlock is concerned, two main problems with the New Boy, at school.

The first, is that he’s a Townie, and there on a scholarship.

The second, is that when Warlock gives him the opportunity for him to copy Adam’s Politics homework, Adam has the audacity to snort, and roll his eyes, and go back to his book.
--
Certain events Concerning a boarding school, two individuals neither angel nor devil, two eleven-year-old boys, and library fees.

This is the problem with children, of course.

They ask difficult questions.

Alix Campbell is not particularly pleased to be on the list of staff for Earth's very first appearance at the Galactic Council.

It's the year 2000 and the Antichrist walks in Pittsburgh. Sometimes he takes the bus.

One switch too many finds Sister Mary Loquacious raising the Adversary, Destroyer of Kings, Angel of the Bottomless Pit, Great Beast that is called Dragon, Prince of This World, Father of Lies, Spawn of Satan, and Lord of Darkness. Or, as she calls him, Jude. She's always liked The Who.

Shortly after leaving the Convent of Petit-Picpus, Cosette encounters a group of children.

I got my hands on some very bad photos of the Waterstones special edition Short Story at the end of The October Man and thought I’d type it up so that everyone here can read it, because we all need some more Vanessa in our lives :)

A rare book collector posting on a niche internet forum is dismayed to discover the last missing book is only available at the best worst bookshop in London.

Warlock Dowling, not-the-anti-christ, was still heavily influenced by an angel and a demon as a child, and it definitely impacted him, as a person. This is a brief excerpt of a visit to his long-term therapist, a very nice and as yet unnamed lady.

“Hi, Becky.”

She calls every year. If asked, Sam would not have a good explanation for why he picks up; Becky is unfailingly unpleasant and usually manages to call at a bad time.

“Did it really happen?”

Sometimes, when he's had a bad day, or when she's really being rude, or when he's just tired of playing therapist to someone he hasn't seen since they were ten, he considers saying no. “Did what happen?” he might say. Or “Sorry, who is this?” Or, if he really wanted to be cruel, he might just not pick up the phone. But—and here is the thing he cannot explain to other people—he knows why she calls, and he would never do that. If she didn't call, he would probably do it himself. He needs reassurance he isn't crazy as much as she does.

Normally an image arriving on Earth was cause for celebration, because it meant the crew was still alive, or at least the ship’s systems were still functioning. Such moments affirmed they were still following their route to a habitable planet that could save mankind. But Steward Mafokeng recoiled from her module, and the image recently downloaded from the Lion’s Mane.

“You think we should retire the ship?” she asked her fellow steward. The other steward was on the lunar base, while she was on Earth buried twenty stories underground, protected against the torrential storms.

Steward Hutchins nodded his head on her communication module. “Clear evidence of cannibalism. Look at the missing hand. It was intentionally severed.”

Circa 1718, Crowley overhears Gabriel announce Aziraphale’s to be promoted back to heaven. What’s a demon to do but thwart the plans of heaven?

(Based on an interview I read where Neil Gaiman said he had to cut a scene in the 18th century with this particular scenario from episode three.)

“She said, ‘You’re going to find the King.’”

“King of what, Dad?”

“Well, that’s just what I asked. And she said, ‘King of the Vipers, Mister. You’ll find the King of the Vipers, who is older than the land we stand on and has lived a dozen lives. When you find him, you must simmer the fat from his body and eat it, and then you will know everything.”

Who else’s life’s purpose, Dad likes to say, reaches out to take them by the hand?

Rosetta knelt to look at the stump in the corner of her client’s bedroom. It had the likeness of a ten-year-old boy, four feet tall, dressed in an oversized shirt and suspenders, and its features were flawless, from the newsboy’s cap cocked on its tight curls, to its pupil-less eyes fringed with long eyelashes. The only oddity was that stump’s hands were unformed, shapeless blobs. It was easy to believe that a sculptor had chiseled a boy out of wood and had stepped away just before finishing its hands.

Rosetta sucked in her breath through her cloth face mask. The SPC hadn’t told her that her first stump extermination would look like a child.

New York is notoriously protective of its superheroes.

She kept her lonely in an elder wood box with silent hinges and a smooth, irregular grain.

Han offers Luke some unexpected support after the funeral of the guy who tortured him.

"It doesn't matter how drunk I get. I don't forget any of it."

A moment from a Jackson's Whole childhood.

My glamour, I know, masks expressions of exasperation. Once I had loved this part of the job, calculating possible returns on risk. But that had been before the interminable waste of the Grass War and the long train of young women and men in front of my desk with the trinkets they thought would give them a chance of not becoming food for crows in a field somewhere.

Four times Han definitely didn’t need anybody’s help, and one time maybe he did.

As you enter the doors of this school for the last time, the girl who your brother slept with last night brightens for just a moment before she realizes you’re not Jesse. She deflates.

You and your brother should be identical—technically you are—but no one has ever mistaken you for each other.

Is your tape still running? Oh, they don’t use tape anymore? That’s clever. Very good.

But really, you came all this way to interview me about the family and what happened to the land and now we’re talking about ghosts! Now, in the twenty-first century, the magic future century we were all promised? No. I don’t believe in ghosts because the crying bride never haunted us. God knows, if anyone had reason to, it was her. You might think that would worry me now that I’m pushing eighty-nine but it doesn’t. It might surprise you, young lady, to learn that I’m pretty satisfied with everything I’ve done.

Pop-star uber-sensation Jaim Janan rockets off to promote their third album atop a SpaceX Dragon VII capsule today, where they will stream a live musical performance from orbit, some 350 kilometers above the Earth. Before today’s launch, when asked if they were feeling nervous about the trip, the young pop star coolly responded, “Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain’t goin’ away.”

It’s not clear how many of Jaim’s obsessive fans, or “Janatics” as they are sometimes known, recognized the star was quoting twentieth-century pop legend Elvis Presley [click for bio]. But by mid-afternoon #TruthIsLikeTheSun was the most popular hashtag on Twitter.

—Naydeen Johnson for The Washington Post

My aunt the roasted chicken to the table and laid it out in front of Lord Ning. It was an excellent supper, and I had helped her with the roasting. I knew that it was good, and at first, from the way Lord Ning started to wolf it down, tearing the chicken with both hands, I thought we would soon be rid of him.

“Nah. We are one hundred percent shit-outta-luck,” she said, voice high and brittle as she leaned back from the computer. She gave a tight little laugh as she gestured at different possible trajectories, the different deflections achievable with nukes or booster rockets or heroic space missions. The wall of screens in front of us showed projected death tolls and ecological changes, with a lot of graphs that dropped sharply right at the end. “Earth is, uh … not to be melodramatic about it, but, absolutely doomed.”

The city lives because we die: we, the shivering, bloody few, the girls who climb the diamond stair in the winter to serve ourselves to the dragon.

Dying, for a Jedi Master in the line of Yoda, was a gentle thing.

or

"Hi, Not Listening To This Anymore," Han said, appearing suddenly. "I'm dead."

The first winter.

Once upon a time there was a city called Omelas, where everyone lived good and happy and fulfilling lives.

Gwen jumps, and when she turns around, Peter B. Parker is standing awkwardly in the bedroom doorway. It’s been a long time since anyone managed to sneak up on Gwen, but all she feels is that she’s surrounded by Peter—no wonder her spider-senses didn’t warn her. “Hey. Um. Sorry, I’m—totally snooping.”

“It’s okay,” Peter shrugs, slouching against the door frame. “It’s not my stuff.”

He’s got a point.
-
(Or: Sometimes you end up in a superhero team up where half the people in the group have your face, or your dead ex/best friend’s face, and you just have to find a way to deal with it.

Gwen, Peter, and the others do their best.)

In which Gregor Vorbarra accidentally acquires a baby.

Luke and Leia, growing up and watching the stars.

Listen, you who would be queen:
What do you know of how to rule?

A prompt from elucreh, for asexual, aromantic Charlotte Collins, and how she finds her happy ending.