The City Below

So…I watched Blindness with Sam today.

It was an incredible film.  It was also completely and absolutely horrifying.  I definitely recommend watching it (I’m ordering it from Amazon as we speak) because the way it is shot and acted is so fucking brilliant, and the story is definitely worth it, but my god.  My fucking god.  My stomach turned.

For Tev:

• thirty two flavors (and then some) by gyzym [Antonia Stark/Pepper Potts]
• Your Fixed Point by quigonejinn [Tony Stark/Pepper Potts, Tony Stark/James Rhodes]
• We Learned By Doing by jibrailis [Antonia Stark/Stephanie Rogers, all female cast]

I thought I had more bookmarked.  Know I’ve def read more.

This is mainly for Tev, but here’s a quick and dirty rec list for the MCU. Pairings will be listed (I am an equal opritunity reader).

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So today has been a day of reading long ass, really fucking good things, and I wish to share them with you.

Why?  Because.

First up, we have Team Building Activities by valtyr, a hilarious Avengers fic with the whole crew.  The summary is “Fury’s a beautiful princess. Clint’s plotting a Communist revolution. Rhodey’s not sexy. Wall-E’s not a documentary. Clint’s not gay but he does give a great blowjob. This fic is not an AU.”  This should tell you what you’re in for.

Next, an X-Men First Class modern AU that borrows heavily from the other movies and the comic canon in terms of characters, Linger by waldorph.  It starts with a haunting and ends with a boy locked away in Alcatraz.  Violent, both described and implied, it’s a marvellous update that addresses the horror of genocide also gets in some nice zingers about our supposed “post-racial” and “post-sexist” society.

So, after reading the man-pain meta essay yesterday, I felt like gathering up a list of badass!women fics.

So I did, and it ended up taking something like 10 hours due to my computer randomly lagging the fuck out.  There are 35 fics on this list, mostly fanfiction, although a couple original fiction are dotted here and there.  Not all of these stories are badass in the traditional way (kicking ass and taking names), but for strength of character, no matter how it’s displayed.  There are some stories I chose not to include because the main focus of the story was on a guy, so there is a severe lack of awesome Uhura and Winona (for example) in here.

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Here be a thing.

So yesterday, akitron reblogged this list of fanfics that the OP would recommend to anyone.  I’m bored and waiting for my video files to copy to my Terra so I can finish packing (jesus fucking christ I am leaving for San Fran in like ten nine hours uuuugh fuck planes), so I decided to do my own list.  And I have like 1200 bookmarks when did that happen?!

The Five Fics that I feel that anyone can read:

1. My Body Is A Cage, Watchmen.

Rorschach’s mask is taken away. All the way back to the police station, the police officers laugh and mock. They complain about the smell, the broken bottle of Nostalgia aftershave that fills the police car like a living being. They laugh about the freckles, the dirty hair, the face only a mother could love, the bruises already forming and filling in on Rorschach’s cheeks and chin. Their fists drive into thin ribs, their boots bring ‘whoof’s of pain out of Rorschach’s mouth as they kick. They laugh as Rorschach screams when they pull the clothes away.
They stop laughing when they cut off the dirty ace bandage wrapped tight around the chest. The room is deadly quiet when they get the pants off and see Rorschach bare and naked.
“Jesus.” One of them says, as Rorschach stands there, shivering and furious, trying to cover the shame of it all with two inadequate hands, “Rorschach’s a girl.”

2. the ones who were taught petrov’s defense, Harry Potter.

In 1998, only a handful of Slytherin students come back: one second year, one third year, and a few fifth years determined to get their O.W.L.s, come hell, high water, or school-wide distaste and discrimination. Astoria and Graham, being the oldest students in the house, automatically become prefects. They’re the only two from Slytherin. There aren’t enough Slytherins for more.

3. Presque Vu, Inception.  Arthur/Eames, Mal/Dom

“Dom asked me to marry him.”
Arthur blinks, finds himself staring into the mirror over the sink, at his own exhausted face, at the pale purple rings under his eyes and his stubble and his hair a wreck, barefoot in on the tile in a threadbare HARVARD t-shirt. He looks as young as Dom treats him, right now, and his breath catches in his throat.
It takes him two tries to say, “That’s a good thing, right? You wanted that?”
“Yes, but Arthur,” Mal cries. “Arthur — I’m going to be married.”
Arthur doesn’t know what’s happening, he doesn’t understand it at all, the sharp wrench of pain in his chest, the poisonous jealousy and sudden grief, the way he feels like the earth has moved beneath his feet. He feels happy for Mal, somewhere deep in his chest, but mostly he feels like someone has punched him in the solar plexus, all the air evaporated from his lungs, and he slides down the wall of the bathroom and listens to Mal cry, swallowing hard around the lump in his throat.
Everything will be different now, he thinks, and thinks, I told him that one day all of your stories would be about him. Arthur thinks about how she’ll never sleep in his apartment again, that they won’t go out to wine bars and drink too much, how she’ll have a ring that will act as the Rubicon between them, that the way their lives have knit together like the fibers in a sheet of paper will have to come undone now, dissolve.
Arthur has always known that it would hurt to dower away all the territory Mal has ceded to him over the years, but it’s always been an abstract thought. Arthur had thought that of course they would marry, but nothing else would change. He recognizes with a burst of heat that it’s idiotic, to think that she and Dom could redraw the map of their relationship without somehow changing the demarcations of Arthur’s claims. He’s sick with it, envy and loneliness and reasonless hurt layered over one another like the leaves of a fan, pressed too tight against his chest.
“We knew it was coming,” he says finally, because Mal is still crying. “I mean, he tried to make me go ring shopping with him, once.”
Mal barks out a wet laugh. “Did you hit him?”
“I said even if I was having sex with four men at once on a float during Pride, I still would not be gay enough to go ring shopping with him,” Arthur tells her. She can probably imagine the way his face had looked when he’d said it, too, the way Dom had gone pale and wretched at the mental image. “Is it pretty?”
“It is terribly tasteless and huge and I don’t know how he afforded it,” Mal reports, nasal, and her voice is echoing, too.
Arthur can imagine her huddled in her bathtub in the cramped one-bedroom she and Dom have shared for more than a year now, the wind brisk outside the creaky window over the toilet. She and Dom will move, of course, and buy a house, and it will be a place Arthur has never known before, and he can just imagine how awkward he’ll feel stepping inside the first time, how she’ll have neighbors he doesn’t know and maybe live in a town even further away. They are losing each other, right now — they are losing each other in one of those achingly bittersweet moments you can’t prepare for.
When long enough goes by without an answer, Mal says, “I don’t want to get married.”
“Of course you do,” Arthur huffs. “Remember? Father of your children? You didn’t care he was tragic and smelled like chalk and office hours?”
“I do,” Mal admits, and she starts crying again, softer this time. “I’m going to miss you.”
Arthur keeps swallowing around the ball in his throat but it won’t go away. “Don’t be stupid, I’m not going anywhere, nothing’s going to change,” he says, but they both know it’s a lie, and they sit on the phone for the rest of the night, running up the long distance charge and saying very little at all. They can be happy for her, happy for Dom and the future they’ll share together tomorrow, when it’s morning and they’re done being sad for whatever it is between them they’re burying now.

4. The Once And Future Pain In My Ass, Dresden Files/Merlin crossover.  Merlin/Arthur

Never sneak up on a wizard. We tend to be a jumpy bunch. We’ll most likely fry your ass and ask questions later.
Or maybe that’s just me.
Not that anyone can blame me. In the last few years, I’ve had all sorts of big nasties waiting to jump me in the shadows. And sometimes in broad daylight. Demons, ghouls, trolls, other wizards, werewolves, vampires—from the Black, Red, and White Courts, since I’m a popular guy with the bloodsuckers, apparently—an entire army of zombies, Chicago Mafia overlords, skinwalkers, the Jolly Green Giant, my own Faerie Godmother, and oh yeah, a horde of ten-foot tall angry goats. Just to name a few.
Ha, you think I’m joking. That’s cute. We’ll see who’s laughing when an invisible demon jumps out to eat your face.

5. Who Caught and Sang the Sun in Flight, BBC’s Sherlock

“What is it about the bloody bees?” Lestrade asked.
Outside the cottage, the birches swayed, throwing shifting dapples of light on the net curtains. “He likes them,” John said, watching the trees. “Keeps him from getting bored.”
Lestrade frowned. “He’s not, I dunno, training them to attack people, is he?”
“No, but don’t give him ideas,” John said emphatically, which drew another small laugh. “Seriously, if it weren’t for the bees he’d be losing his mind out here…”
Lestrade winced.
“Sorry,” John said, looking down at his lap. “It’s easier to talk about when you live with it, I suppose. No choice in the matter.”

Here are three honourable mentions:

• The One Where Ray Person Time Travels, Generation Kill.  (It was like having asthma, excluding the nudity, brushes with the law, and being chased by angry grandmothers with sticks for being an exhibitionist pervert.  So maybe it wasn’t like having asthma at all.)
• The Weight of Words, Merlin.  (Camelot is all about lying. Power-plays are built upon the foundations of words; intangible. Words send men to war and words can stop a war, can turn a head, can break a heart. Power lies in the perfect manipulation of the words, and the one whose mastery of words is complete dominates the Court at Camelot.)
• Live to Tell, Burn Notice.  (Michael is five the first time he hears the word “drunk”.)

And my favourite AU of all time, I’ve Got Nothing To Do Today But Smile (The Only Living Boy in New York), Inception.  Arthur/Eames.  Arthur’s a corporate lawyer, Eames owns the coffee shop across the street, and all good love stories start with a quadruple shot latte.

I just spent like, an hour doing all that.  XD  And I still have an hour’s worth of file moving to go!