meikuree

(the title's a bad Strokes reference.)

another round of fic recs, with a little gen sprinkled around and vaguely dirtybadwrong or bad-bildungsroman themed (as usual my preferred escapism can be summed up as "women psychosexually torturing or imprinting on each other"). less comprehensive than usual because I'm just clearing out a backlog, apologies:

gen
rock, river, permeable flesh by elijah_was_a_prophet (The Locked Tomb)
The end of time. Gideon boards a train.

A wreath of reeds by laughingpineapple (Disco Elysium)
Steban, touch grass. Grass, touch Steban.

f/f
poma venusta by Anonymous (Hilary Tamar Mysteries - Sarah Caudwell)
Dulcia non semper sunt ori poma venusta. Selena and Julia, leaving a party.

the opening alone is divine. and this moment:

quote

As though it were something that Julia had long known she had on hand, like a book or a bottle, and had but to take up and open. The extraordinary, consuming absence of the tension of the opening gambit, as she had always thought of it – not ungratifying, not wholly unerotic, to observe the effect achieved, but one never lost the sustaining consciousness of what might follow after: a belt to unfasten, or a tab to be paid, or a lecture to attend. A question of judging the diplomatic minimum, of withdrawing while still wanted. A little antechamber spent thinking, mostly, about films and poses: how the leads fitted together, where the actress put her hands.

She had not thought, below the windows, about where to put her hands. She had not known whose hands were whose. There had been no occasion for the surreptitious glance downward to see whether anything had risen, like the strong back of a fish half seen in the water, to what you could not help calling, if that were the model you were using, the lure. There had been no thought of after, or at all. For five minutes, unprecedented in her brief, avid, largely successful amatory career, hers had not been the directing intelligence.

geist, geist, ungeist by foxbones (Tár (2022))
“She’s nothing to go wrecking your life over, you know.”

Krista, Francesca, and Maestro - before the events of the film.

read this fandom-blind based on someone's rec, because life's too short to cheat yourself out of the delicious sociology of terrible mentor-protege relationships or something. this exchange amused me an unreasonable amount (NSFW heads-up):

quote

“You’re a shit lay,” Krista whispered. Fran groaned, pushed her off.

“Shut up.”

“You eat cunt like you hate it.”

“Because I do hate you. I hate you and your cunt.”

the look of it by cordial (Dune - 2021, Jessica/Liet Kynes)

"I am—" She paused to flick through her titles. "Fremen. We survive by noticing the smallest shifts in the desert."
(Jessica and Liet's paths intersect for a while longer at the station.)

I'm always reccing cordialcount's stuff, whose writing has the 3 Bs (brutal, brilliant, beautiful), and stuns me half into wordlessness and half into enjoyable analysis all the time. this fic in particular is convincing and sold me on these two (headcanoning now that Jessica abandoned her prophet son to go gallivant with another MILF, brb), and it's also one of the hottest fics I've read, all without having any explicit or on-screen sex (that use of porn as worldbuilding, man).

quotes

In the palmaries of future ecological formulae: Jessica reached through the candelilla and verbena toward Liet. The light, luscious in its wet reflection, dappled Jessica's ankles, her thighs, the wave of her hair before it fell into the blooms. A tower from another world, in her height and self-possession. Liet shuddered in the grass as she never would have wasted sweat to do in the harsher sun of undreamt Arrakis. Jessica's Voice scraped out of her like sandpaper as it found Liet's mind and scoured it smooth.

[...]

Liet could still feel the slick of the last evening inside her stillsuit as she undressed. Jessica's moisture, recycling through and through her.

Too soon to find marriage or a lover, Jessica said. You won't be tamed by either. I was a half of something when Leto was here, but Liet, you don't plan to be half of anything.

Liet cupped Jessica's belly with the soft palm of her hand, where the calluses didn't reach. She breathed in. Even the air felt—smelled—damp this close to Jessica's body, underlain by the warm complexity of spice when the muscles jumped in her thigh. Use the Voice, then, Liet whispered. Tell me to fuck you like no one else exists in the world.

the gallows in paradise by klickitats (Dragon Age, Calpernia/Leliana)
The war against Corypheus approaches its natural end. Leliana finds his general, Calpernia, half-dead in a river and attempts to make her a tool for Inquisition use. But knives cut both ways, and Calpernia discovers a mystery to unravel Leliana's entire world.

a gem of a rarepair, and I like the exploration of the horrible and insouciant and horribly insouciant hegemony of the narrative 'heroes' in the Inquisition. plus this line:

There are still gallows in paradise, Leliana. They just hang the anointed ones with silk rope.

architect of a whole world's nightmares by suitablyskippy (Danganronpa, Enoshima Junko/Ikusaba Mukuro, sibling incest)
“The wind’s really loud here,” says Mukuro, and her tone is very flat, almost uncannily extremely exactly as though she’s trying to hide a breaking heart! “I didn’t get all of that.” Junko imagines her: underground, her snowhole, scraped out till it fit as close as a womb, eyes blank – impassive – ice cold! – and she’s wrapped in furs and snug in a sleeping bag – no, she’s naked and snug in a sleeping bag, and Junko runs one soft bare foot up one smooth bare leg and shivers at the thought. “Did you need something?”

“Thinkin bout you!” says Junko. “Thinkin bout the apocalypse.”

(Mukuro spends three years as a soldier and a missing person, and she still can't get away from Junko: but even if she could, she wouldn't.)

The Preservation of the World by StripySock (Ginger Snaps, Brigitte Fitzgerald/Ginger Fitzgerald)

“I went to the woods to live deliberately,” she shouts at Ginger’s back, clad in a red puffer jacket to avoid being mistaken for a target. The irony is not lost on Brigitte.

Ginger turns round, looking completely unimpressed. “You did not,” she says, hair tucked into the back of her coat, too-pale face peeking out.

“No,” Brigitte admits. “I did not. I went to the woods because otherwise you were going to end up in a lab, on your hind legs begging for a biscuit.”

I wrote some Goncharov fic:

mutually assured revivification (~1,400 words)
Goncharov (1973) dir. Martin Scorsese - beelzeebub
Katya/Sofia, Mature
Tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Post-Canon, Body Worship, Moscow

Summary:

The who’s-who of Napoli still says Yekaterina Goncharova stings like a winter gale, a white and fearsome beauty in pellucid silks. But beneath the mythology and armour of fiction, Sofia doesn’t fear her.

Or: Katya and Sofia indulge themselves with time, in a post-credits coda.

I got two wonderful gift fics too, which I heartily recommend reading!

And when I come home, cold and tired by clementina
The Locked Tomb, Harrowhark/Ianthe, T
Sometime in the fourth century of the second myriad of the Resurrector—because, really, who kept count anymore? She could barely remember which decade they were in. The third, maybe.

(Harrow, who kept track of these things, would know that they were in the fifth decade. She would despair of her negligence: Really, Tridentarius, you have half a decent brain and you can’t be bothered to look at a calendar? Ianthe would reply that she needed her brilliant mind for grander, better things; Harry could be the menial timekeeper if she so wished. Harrow would say: It’s the year four hundred fifty-seven. And so it was.)

Thusly: in the year four hundred fifty-seven of the second myriad of the Kindly Prince—that that King of Kings, the Lord of the River, the Prince of Death!—the Eight Saint surfaced back into her body with a jolt.

Nothing Ugly by cordialcount
아가씨 | The Handmaiden (2016); Hideko/Sook-Hee, M
The early what-ifs were playful: What would it have been like, if we grew up together in your dorm of thieves? If we were schoolgirls together in Gyeongseong? If we were persimmon farmers? Excuses, only, to buy a hundred pretty hats and ruin them.