a conspiracy of cartographers

Happy sigh, this morning I woke up to another Yuletide gift!

Welcome to the Family, an Exorcist fic in which Verity skypes home to her siblings to tell them about college and about her new girlfriend Kat!! When I asked for Verity/Kat in my request list I really felt it was the longest of shots, but here we are, with a cozy lovely fic that's a bit about that, and more about all the Kim kids, and is perfect.

And this morning I have a Yuletide treat!

Get What You Want [Whip It]
This is a wee Bliss/Pash fic, and utterly delightful! There's the derby team being encouraging, and jokes about hipsters, and Bliss making a typical spur-of-the-moment decision, and it makes me all fuzzy and happy.

In other news, in between my Yuletide reading, I ... seem to be watching Dark Angel. I've been meaning to for a while anyway, because one can never have too many post-apocalyptic Seattle cityscapes and girls with superpowers and canonical lesbians (whom the writing doesn't fail too often, though I still twitch occasionally, aaand we did have a dead lesbian a few episodes ago, but I'm pretty sure Original Cindy makes it) and it is kind of delightful! I am waiting for it to get awful in second season or something, but to be perfectly honest I might not even notice, because I just hit the season one episode with baby Jensen Ackles and temporarily lost all my critical thinking functions -- jury's still out whether this is because I've trained myself to see Jensen's face and shut down critical thinking skills so I don't try to reach through my computer and murder the episode writers, or because baby Jensen is just that fucking beautiful. Probably a bit of both!

Drifting off to sleep last night, I began idly wondering what a Dark Angel/Supernatural fusion would be like, but that thought is better cut off at the pass, because it would turn into an epic in which Dean and Sam and Jo and, fuck it, Cas and Gabriel and Ruby and Anna, all escape Manticore as children; Sam and Dean manage to stay together for a couple of years, and when they have to split up, Dean keeps moving, and Sam ends up being adopted by Bobby and pretending to live a normal life for a while. Obviously then they meet up again and go on the run, and Dean is obsessed with finding their other siblings, and Sam just wants to be ~normal~, and I'm not sure who's after them from Manticore, if it's John or Zachariah or what, but IT DOESN'T MATTER BECAUSE I'M NOT WRITING IT.

In conclusion, baby Jensen Ackles.

I laugh when I see some variant of "if you can guess my Yuletide fic before Saturday, I'll write you a ficlet!" around my flist. I laugh because if I did this I would owe everyone a ficlet. I wrote two other fics as well, you know! You could try guessing those! All I really want to write right now is reams of Narnia fic, though, so I suppose if you want ficlets about my Edmund Is Queer agenda, you could have a go at guessing.

This post is not really for that, though. It is in fact a Yuletide recs post!

( 50 recs: Black Books, Bend It Like Beckham, Chronicles of Narnia/Tam Lin, Calvin and Hobbes plus crossovers with Foxtrot and Where the Wild Things Are, Discworld, Demon's Lexicon, Hark! A Vagrant, Lilo & Stitch, Lost Girl, Magic School Bus, Mulan, Muppet Show/Doctor Who, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, Slings & Arrows, Tintin, and Young Wizards. )

I am not sure how enthusiastic I can be right now, because I am still ragingly ill, but actually that is a perfectly good state in which to snuggle up in a bunch of blankets and read the whole Yuletide archive. Before I do that, though, I got a fic!

Well This Is Just Weird, Hark! A Vagrant, Holmes & Watsons
What it says on the tin, really! This fic is delightfully weird in a Beaton-esque, meta way: some Watsons go missing, and during their investigations Holmes and Watson discover something very strange. This fic made me laugh aloud, clearly knows its Holmes canon very well, and left me with a giant grin on my face. Also, let's be honest, deep down all I wanted for Yuletide was exactly this fandom and these characters, so I am one satisfied Aria.

Now it is time for ALL THE TEA and ALL THE ARCHIVE.

I am full of so much glowy holiday spirit I don't know what to do with it! My giftfics this year are splendiferous. I only received the one Yuletide story, but that's all right, because i. I only wrote one and that's karmically sound; ii. I also have my due South Seekrit Santa; and iii. I would not trade in these fics for the world. They're just. Sdldfskd.

First, I opened my holiday card from wintercreek this morning; on the outside of the card is a charming little picture of two guys on a sleigh ride through a snowy woods, and on the inside is a holiday letter from Fraser and Ray. How wonderful is that? They told me about their impractical Christmas tree, and that Dief says 'hi'. I think I want letters from fictional characters all the time, because it's awesome beyond words. Thanks, wintercreek, it's absolutely wonderful. <3

And that was just the preliminaries!

My Yuletide: But Rather Darkness Visible [Doctor Who/Young Wizards]
How do I love this story? Let me count the ways. Let's start with the one where it's a Doctor Who/Young Wizards crossover. I strongly suspect that whoever wrote this story either has me friended or follows me (so HEY THERE, ANON, I LOVE YOU) because how long have I been nattering on about how I need to write exactly this? Of course I was never going to, and now someone has, for me, better than I could've! The mythological blending is perfect, there are Shakespeare metaphors and of course a Star Wars joke, and both Dairine and Ten are absolutely pitch-perfect. I can't stop beaming.

My dSSS: loquacious (loh-KWEY-shuhs) [due South]
Fraser/Kowalski established-relationship fic, post-series. I am completely in love with this Ray; Fraser feels somehow incidental to the story, which I love, because there's a point in the narrative where Stella tells Ray that the Mountie's been good for him, and spectacularly misses the point. What I really love about it, though, is that each section header starts with a long word that Ray then uses sometime in that section, which -- I was not previously aware how easy I am for Ray making beautiful paragraphs! I really am. And the ending is whipped cream topping off the awesomecake.

Now with that metaphor I'm off to have breakfast with the folks. The Archive is slow like a very slow thing right now from all the Yuletide traffic, so I'm going to give it a rest for a few hours (during which I might even come up with some sort of attack plan for how I'll organize my read-through); and of course there's the rest of dSSS to read. Plus the physical present exchange with my parents.

I'm an extremely happy Aria! I hope all of your Yuletides/other holiday practices/normal days are going wonderfully too.