yuletide recs.

[schmerica]

Oh, yuletide. Your loot is so amazing.

A few recs from my first look through, just clicking on the most intriguing fandoms for me:

Girls Like Her: Nine Moments in the Life of Kit Keller (A League of Their Own)
http://www.yuletidetreasure.org/archive/8/girlslike.html

Three walks and only one strike; Kit figured she must really be tired. She adjusted her hat and concentrated on the player at the plate: centerfielder from Racine, only ninth in the lineup. The girl was young, probably her age, but with a very different figure: long brown hair pulled behind her neck in a loose bun, broad hips, and an hourglass figure. She found herself staring and hoped that the look on her face passed for a cross between exhaustion and concentration, rather than whatever had compelled her to stare. She wasn't exactly sure what she was thinking, but she knew she'd better try harder to concentrate or Dottie would never let her hear the end of it.

So Few Come Back (All About Eve)
http://www.yuletidetreasure.org/archive/6/sofew.html

"Do you ever still talk to your theater friends, Miss Harrington?"

Last week, Bill's agent told Zanuck that Bill would rather shoot on Everest than direct my new picture. It's the closest we've come to speaking in six years. "I find it rather like corresponding with school chums," I say. "It feels so very long ago, almost as if I were but a child. Anyway I prefer the youthful spirit of my Hollywood set."

Reprise (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid)
http://www.yuletidetreasure.org/archive/7/reprise.html

They boarded the Pacific Union at Douglas, and she felt every rotation of its mighty wheels. *Kchank*. *Kchank*. *Kchunk*. Away. Away. Away.

Money was spent freely now as they moved ever eastwards. It was a holiday like none she had ever imagined, something cribbed from the gossip columns of a big-city paper. They were enjoying themselves, and she wondered where the desperate intensity had gone.

It was bitterly cold in New York. A fitful snow fell every night now--flakes drifting down into the narrow streets and then whirling back up into the sky as they got caught in the cross-drafts. Etta loved those winds. She loved the exhilaration of fighting her way through them while her skirts and shawl flapped wildly.

The Beautiful Dawn (Casablanca)
http://www.yuletidetreasure.org/archive/6/thebeautiful.html

Did I mention that Rick is considered an enigma? Sascha, Emil, and even Carl--Rick's cafe manager--are all at a loss for why he would do such an expensive thing. I alone know the answer. It makes me feel quite special, but not in a good way at all.

"Why do you interfere with my little romances?" I ask him, the disappointment in my gonads overpowering the sensibilities of my brain--and not for the first time, I must admit.

"Consider it a gesture to love," he says.

The answer does not improve my mood.

Distance Summoning (Chronicles of Chrestomanci)
http://www.yuletidetreasure.org/archive/7/distancesummoning.html

Dear Christopher,

How could you, you awful, awful boy! Why didn't you tell me Proudfoot was going to have kittens? You have been deliberately withholding information, and I shall not forget this. You're still withholding information, because you haven't told me anything interesting about the kittens. How many are there? What colors? How many boys and how many girls? Have you named them yet? And what do you mean they look like Throgmorten?

Snow and Changes (Chronicles of Prydain)
http://www.yuletidetreasure.org/archive/10/snowand.html

At least that was Eilonwy's theory. Her opinions of the populace and predictions for the future had been considerably more cynical than Taran's even from the start-which was not to say that she was a pessimist. She'd never been a pessimist. She had always been a cynic, but that wasn't precisely the same as being a pessimist-she supposed that despite all of the things she'd been through by now, she was still a nave young girl. You had to be over thirty to be a pessimist, she decided, but she'd been a cynic from the first day she was born.

Or maybe it was the other way around. It was of no great importance, she decided. It wouldn't do to think about silly things like that.

Further Reflections (Death/Sandman)
http://www.yuletidetreasure.org/archive/9/furtherreflections.html

If there's one thing wizards hate more than fresh vegetables and healthy exercise, it's having to ask for help. And if there's one thing wizards hate even more than that, it's having to ask for help from someone who isn't a wizard. By the time they have to ask for help from a non-male non-wizard, many find themselves having odd cravings for broccoli and an early morning run. The fact that the lady in question was Death's granddaughter didn't help, either. But after Thripplecreak's misadventure and the entire faculty's failed attempts to send the summoned creature back, it was either Susan or her grandfather. Susan, at least, could be relied upon not to grin all the damned time.

Funny (Freaks and Geeks)
http://www.yuletidetreasure.org/archive/5/funny.html

He was going just slow enough to see that there were people making out in the Gremlin. He thought it might be funny to pretend to be a cop, to knock on the window and say in a goofy high-pitched voice that they were under arrest for public lewdness. Sex wasn't necessarily funny, but lewdness was hysterical.

He peeked into the car, fist raised and ready for the hilarious knock, and saw that one of the people making out was Lindsay Weir. He got back on his bike and pedaled like his ass was on fire.

Asses on fire? Always good for a laugh.

The Winds to Nova Zembla (His Dark Materials)
http://www.yuletidetreasure.org/archive/8/thewinds.html

She brushed it aside as if he was an untried virgin - which, to her, he almost was - and took his mouth as if she was the man and he was the woman; hard and sweet, not letting go, all coffee and the faint bitterness of cigars that no morning rinse with salt could remove. It was more like slow argument than kissing, all mixed up, his hands at her hips as if they had been beached there and her mouth warm and insistent.

"Honey," Lee said, with her mouth measuring the distance between his lip and his ear, the stubble he hadn't quite removed without a mirror, "you're like my flag, you're my banner, I cain't do this to you."

"I'm no church," she whispered in his ear. "I'm no thing to be worshipped. Respected, yes, loved, maybe feared, but I am not Ruta Skadi."

Bake Sale: a Mixed Media Collage (Joan of Arcadia)
http://www.yuletidetreasure.org/archive/9/bakesale.html

Dear Joan,
I'm sorry I freaked you out. I guess I misunderstood what you meant, or I guess really how you looked, and anyway it was stupid of me. I'm sorry. Can we just forget this and go back to not talking to each other?

Dear Joan,
I'm sorry for what I did. For both our sakes, it's probably a good idea if one of us quits the kids' art therapy group, and I figured that since you were newer since you didn't seem that excited about being there anyway, maybe it could be you. Not that I'm trying to force you out. I just think it would be a good idea.

Dear Joan,
I

Dear Joan,

Anodyne (Royal Tenenbaums)
http://www.yuletidetreasure.org/archive/8/anodyne.html

She returns with one less finger and no more insight than she'd taken with her.

"You went to find your family?" Richie asks, genuinely puzzled. "But I'd've gone with you, Margot. I would have helped you. You should have asked me."

"I had to do it alone." She taps Morse code onto the table with her new wooden finger.

Richie shakes his head, spoons soup into his mouth. "Yeah, but - " he slurps around a noodle, "you lost your finger."

"It makes me unique," she replies, smiling. Her face feels raw, unused. *That was my first real smile*, she thinks.

Peacocks & Pistols (Sorcery and Cecelia)
http://www.yuletidetreasure.org/archive/8/peacockspistols.html

They couldn't go terribly far before it became dark. "Do you want a light?" Thomas asked. His voice sounded overly loud to James' ears, attuned to the crunch of boots in snow and the whistle of a wind that grew steadily colder.

He coughed. "No, we shouldn't risk it," he said. "We'll need to camp until morning."

Thomas paused. "What about a heating spell?" he asked.

"Oh, please do!" James said, and Thomas chuckled. When they found a reasonably sheltered patch of clear ground beneath a fallen oak tree that held no animal occupants, he cast the spell with a circling of his hands and a rapid-fire mutter that might have begun life as enunciated Greek. It bespoke long familiarity with warming cold beds that James frankly envied. He unrolled the blanket from his own pack and spread it on the ground, then crawled onto it.

(I feel vaguely het OTP-ish about both couples in this book, but the slash is this story is set well before the events in Sorcery and Cecelia.)

Comments

[aerye.livejournal.com]

Isn't "So Few Come Back" utterly wonderful? I keep imaging the cover of a lesbian pulp novel, with Eve Harrington lounging by the pool looking predatory and a young, wholesome reporter girl with her skirt pulled carefully over her knees. I want to read the whole book!

[pearl-o.livejournal.com]

Oh, oh, yes. Very much so. Dude, seriously, it's so much more than I expected for my yuletide story.

[tinylegacies.livejournal.com]

Oh - thanks for the JoA rec!

What an amazingly touching story.