Rise Up, Oh Heart, For There is Another Battle to Win

For the random title fic meme, from @littlestartopaz:  Sugar and spice. Miraculous! Fandom

This is obviously the fic where Alya is convinced that her best friend is cheating on her boyfriend who is…also cheating on her?  It’s all a little confusing, honestly, there are a lot of people to keep track of in this…love trapezoid, or so she tells Nino when she commandeers recruits him to help figure it out.

There are three problems with her mission to figure out what the hell is going on with Marinette and Adrien.  Little problems.  Tiny, really.  She can barely see them, they’re so small.

First of all, Marinette and Adrien are impossible to keep track of, which means she can’t even get a good picture of the guilty parties caught red-handed.  Alya can get around this, okay, she is a skilled journalist, she’ll figure it out even if she has to bug the little bastards.  (Nino thinks this is going a bit far, but she did not ask for his opinion, thank you very much.)

Second of all, neither Marinette nor Adrien will even entertain suspicion of each other, which under any other circumstances Alya would consider a good thing.  Really!  But how are they so dense, she wonders aloud on more than a few occasions to Nino.  Hell, they’re always running off without explanations, anyone would be suspicious.

Third of all, and this might be a slightly bigger problem, the other half of this set of guilty couples is pretty high profile.

But how do you just up and accuse the heroes of Paris of cheating with a couple of high school students?

Anonymous asked: Twisted By Simple Light

Maniacal cackling.  This would be/might actually someday be the title of the Fic We Shall Not Speak Of, previously discussed here.  I’m literally going to copy-paste because I’m so pleased with that summary.

Padme Naberrie-not-yet-Amidala is three when the Force comes to her, as strong as one of the great storms that close down all of Naboo, four when the Jedi turn her away for being too old, five when she begins teaching the Force to herself.

Surely emotion is not wicked at its core, young Padme says, surely not, and she reaches out, learns to shape the Force with her passions and her loves and her rages and her laughs, and it is warm and rich and wild and vicious and everything (and surely this cannot be the Dark Side).  

When she stands on the Tatooine sand and meets a boy who shines like a sun, some part of her mind (the part that’s seen people die because their vaunted politicians took too long to see them suffering, the part that’s seen wars start over petty arguments and diplomatic differences, the part that looks around Tattooine and thinks look at all these suffering people, if only I had the power to save them) says yesssss.  And she reaches out and she takes his hand and she stays in touch and she assures him that no, emotion is not wrong, love is not wrong, Attachment is not wrong, he is not wrong.  

One day…oh, one day he comes to her, wild-eyed, with the words of another person on his tongue and talk about Sith, and she does her research and she thinks look at all these suffering people, if only I had the power, and…

Well.  Padme only wants to help.  Surely the ends justify the means.  Surely this cannot be Dark, if it’s to save starving children and wounded soldiers and slaves.

And the Empire rises under the command of its Empress and her iron fist, Darth Vader.

sroloc--elbisivni asked: For the fic titles prompt: the word that breathed the world (Librarians? Maybe?)

For the record, I have no idea if this is legitimate and/or refuted by an episode I haven’t seen (desperately, desperately behind), but S T I L L.  This fic would be the story of the Library’s favorites through the millennia (she is a library, after all–her favorites are wordsmiths and silver-tongued diplomats, world-changers and storytellers).

The Library is sentient.  This is not a commonly known fact–sometimes Librarians go their whole career without even realizing it.  She does not particularly mind this.

(Sometimes, in the netherspace where she has a shape that is more woman than building, she meets with others like herself.  A waif of a boy, the thirteenth of his kind, whose eyes crackle with purple lightning, tells wild stories of heroics and villany and…goo?  A slender willow-wand fae dressed in ragged white and trailing glittering dust in her wake complains of her lovesick king and the mortal girl who defeated him.  The boy is young, only centuries old.  The willow-wand is ancient, even older than the Library.  There are others, but these are the eldest and the youngest, the bookends of their kind.)

The vital thing about a sentient being is that sentient beings have favorites–it’s unavoidable.  The Library being rather fickle, not all of her favorites are Librarians.

Galahad is sheltered in her Annex on the merits of his old friends, more so than on his own.  Merlin asked, and she loved him, so she did as requested.  Merlin isn’t quite like her, but he’s not quite human either, and sometimes, very occasionally, she will sense the touch of a hand on one of her many doors as Merlin passes by.

Greek and Rome were riddled with poets and philosophers–the others like her had varying opinions on them.  She was fond of Catullus with his filthy sense of humor, and of Plato with his unusually good grasp of the netherworld, but, oh, Sappho she loved.

Sun Tzu was too warlike to be a Librarian, too much a tactician and not enough of a dreamer, but she would slip him secrets of long-dead armies in his dreams to bolster his writing.

Poe and Shelley and Byron and Keats–she did love the Romantics.  They were her favored for years, brilliant comets that burned out so fast.  The willow-wand shook her head at the Library for it, remarking on the merits of immortal citizenry.

But William–William was her best beloved, her most cherished mortal favorite.  She would be hard-pressed to find someone to stand beside him and his golden words and dirty jokes and impossible wisdom.  Not even the willow-wand could hold that against her, her immortal faerie residents drawn to his starlight words like moths to a flame.

(When Prospero first stepped into her walls, she had a moment of blind hope that maybe, somehow, her dear Shakespeare had returned to her.)

Anonymous asked: for the random fic titles: "spring will be here soon"

Since you didn’t specify a fandom….this is the story of the girl Jaylah.

Her people are from a high tundra part of their world–even after she forgets the name of her planet, the name of her people, the name of her family, she will remember this.  The shimmer of the sun at midnight, the dance of stars at pitch-black noon, and the song of the wind over the snow-layered ground will stay in her dreams all her life, a tiny scrap of peace.  Winter on the high tundra is dangerous, even in the cities-and-starships age, and Jaylah’s people never quite managed to forget their heritage of cold nights and terror.  The promise of new life, of melted snow and living things, is the hope their people holds up to get through the days of unbroken night, the vow they make in the darkest moments of their life to fight on.  

As a little girl wondering if the sun will ever come back, Jaylah’s mother strokes her hair back from her face and whisper that spring would come soon, so soon that Jaylah wouldn’t even believe it.  

In Krall’s dungeons, as Jaylah sobs silently, hands pressed to her mouth so hard that her teeth draw blue bruises on the white skin, her father hugs her to his side.  “Spring will be here soon, you’ll see, precious girl,” he whispers–a lie, but the familiar words soothe her tears and make her mother, bleeding out slowly from a gash to the leg, and her mama, pressing her hands to her wife’s skin, smile faintly.  

When her mama is taken, still smudged blue with her mother’s blood, she kisses Jaylah forehead and her cheeks and promises, “Spring will be here soon, little snowflake, little darling.”  A lie, but a warm and gentle one, bittersweet.

When her father dies, and she runs until she can’t breathe for tears, she curls up in a mountain cave, far too close to the search parties scouring for her, and she lies to herself, “Spring will be here soon, Jaylah.  You just have to stand up.”  And she scrubs her face with her palms and pulls herself upright.  

She tells the lie a thousand times, a hundred thousand times, every time a new circuit breaks or she hasn’t eaten in twelve days or she is run off from a precious salvage or she can’t stand the loneliness any longer.  Spring will be here soon, Jaylah.  Get up and meet it on your feet.

Years from now, she’ll be an ensign sitting cross-legged on a chair in the Enterprise mess hall, surrounded by the bridge crew and Montgomery Scotty and Doctor Bones, her red Operations uniform a bright contrast to her white hair and a glass of scotch from Montgomery Scotty’s illicit still in her hand.  (She will know, by then, what a nickname is, but she will insist on her old names for them, at times like this, when they are together and laughing.)  Captain James T will smile at her, and Montgomery Scotty will clap her on the back as he tells them about how she repaired the replicators and stopped them from turning all the food purple, and she will think that perhaps she was not lying to herself all along after all.