Recs: Femslash and misc. XF

[thuviaptarth]

I'm very grateful to double_helix for putting together femslash04; I've enjoyed a lot of the stories (see below), and look forward to reading the rest. 

Femslash recs

For a different challenge, vaznetti wrote "Tense and Skin"; I mention it with this round-up because it's my favorite Lauren/Sydney story to date. Vanzetti's careful, cool, slightly distant prose suits the triple-crossing, scheming, possible sociopaths of Alias perfectly, and here it conveys Lauren's suppressed panic and unsuppressed resentment and rage.

In the muffled sterility of the company hospital--antiseptic over ink and cordite--they sit in silence. Sydney will not leave. Lauren feels her presence like an itch, like craving a cigarette, until she has to clasp her hands to keep from striking out. The pose suits her--demure, dutiful--and no one would blame her if she staged a collapse of her own. Well-wishers come and stumble over a few words; she sees their averted gazes and nods mutely at their hushed condolences and well-meant encouragement. All she can see is Sydney, everywhere she turns.

pearl_o wrote me "Trial and Error," a lovely piece that captures all of Kaylee's charm and unabashed pleasure in sex.  The tour through the ensemble made me miss the show all over again.

It had been ages since she'd had a good tumble, was the thing. And maybe Jayne wasn't the brightest, and maybe she wouldn't trust him any further than she could throw him -- and maybe not even that much -- but, heck. Kaylee hadn't ever gone this long by herself since she stopped plaiting her hair. By this time she wasn't about to throw Jayne out of bed for being a jackass.

Or at least that was what she was thinking, but as it turned out -- well. It just wasn't any *good*.

When you came right down to it, it was flat-out the worst sex Kaylee had ever had.

minim_calibre's "Fractal" is probably my favorite of the stories posted for the challenge; I only wish it were the dry run for something longer, something that would tease out the implications of the world Min hints at, something that would give as much of Willow as we get here of Fred.  But what we get is delicious, a snapshot of the inside of Fred's head and the outside of Willow's body:

Fred outlines a constellation of freckles with the edge of her thumbnail, connecting each light brown dot with a faint pink line on white skin. The Big Dipper. She'll find her way home by the North Star, a tiny splotch on Willow's left shoulder blade.

leadensky's "Been Too Long" offers a glimpse into the world of Firefly and a companion's training, gracefully filling in the gaps the show never got to:

In House Madrassa, the older Companions did not take lovers from the initiate levels. Do not mix honey and ink, the Housemothers said – nor instruction and love. The elders kept the younger girls close and veiled, fretting over their youth and inexperience and fearful of a poor first bedding that could ruin a Companion for life.

mazily's "what's left is magic" displays her usual gorgeous, painfully compressed imagery and her usual stark characterization of the failure of love in the face of loneliness, anger, or fear; although the story probably won't work for people not already convinced of the viability of the core pairing.

She's not afraid of death.

Death, a noun, meaning "the absence of life or state of being dead."

Or even dying. She's not; at least, not in the traditional sense. She's afraid of nothingness, of an endless lacking, and she realizes (late at night, Mulder's body warm and solid beside her) that she's actually been dead for years.

She's a doctor, and she knows such things. The symptoms are clear.

moireach's "Mapped" economically sketches out a fifth-season AU; the ratio of exposition to story is perhaps too high, but Kyra's prose is lovely as usual, her characterization utterly convincing, and this moment of quiet tenderness just warms me all through:

Tara's hands are a spiderweb of scars, faint and shimmering lines traced across them from the spell that went wrong, the one she tried to fix Willow. Dawn remembers Xander clumsily bandaging them, right before they buried Buffy, how Tara couldn't stop crying and Dawn didn't think it had anything to do with the angry red lines glowing under her skin. Now, though, they're almost pretty, thin silvery patterns, and she's careful to press lightly on Tara's palm with her pen, tracing out the character.

When she's done, Tara smiles and tilts her head to look at it.

"Pretty," she says, and her skin is warm against Dawn's hand.

"Actually, yeah," says Dawn, suddenly very aware of her own pulse. "It also means beauty."

jacito "missives" is for a fandom I don't know (ghost world); in snapshots, jacito beautifully evokes the aftermath of a friendship or romance, the sorrow of summer dying into fall.

September was caramel apple sticky, all over heat, skin damp, sky dripping. One customer said her brain had melted, and Rebecca chuckled because that's what she got paid to do, but her brain had dripped out long ago, she thought. At night she dreamt that she followed the trail of grey bits, her brains marking a path along the sidewalk, past the bus stop, and into a town that did not exist. A town twisting in a cool breeze, the sun hovering near clouds and not burning through walls and trees and skin. A town where she would find Enid.

I love Buffy/Faith with a mad passion, but mostly I love it as dark and doomed: the kind of story I first encountered in bettyp's "Orleans" and most recently encountered in hesychasm's "Theurgy".  But I have a Sekrit post-"Chosen" fantasy that, in the brave new world, Buffy and Faith might actually be happy together.  themoonbar feed this fantasy with  "The Second Self" and her delicate depiction of Faith and Buffy just maybe moving on.

In her room, Faith still paces out the length of a jail cell and has moments of complete panic, when she can think of nothing but new territory and new faces.

But they live the kind of life you make up for yourself when you’re a kid: daily ice cream cones, take-out for dinner and watching movies until four in the morning before passing out in a heap.

She’s obviously spent too much time with Angel, because she always imagined that her moment of redemption would be obvious, surrounded by prophecies and fanfare and dead bodies.

But she’s starting to think it might be quieter than that. Maybe it’s enough to stay.

February X Files recs

I did X Files recs for crack_van in February:

"Night Giving Off Flames" by Jesemie's Evil Twin
"Zahgruda" by CazQ
"Undying" by Elanor G.
"Love and Darkness and Our Genomes" by Sarah Segretti
"Mission" by Alloway
"Iolokus" by Mustang Sally and Rivka T.
"Above Rubies" by Rachel Howard
"Moment of Inertia" by Pteropod
"Other People" by Pares
"She's Waiting" by Philippa
"A Bitter Taste on the Tongue" by Jane Mortimer
"Suttee" by Jintian
"My Little Demons" by a frightened little girl
"Sixty Degrees of Separation" by Barbara D.