Spring Green

• Snape backstory. Snape/Lily and AUs also good.
  
• Lily getting to be an actual person instead of a love interest or a dead mother.
  
• Narcissa
  
• Luna and/or Neville, either character studies (especially with Neville's parents! Or Longbottom backstory), or ship fic. I could probably ship them with nearly anyone.
  
• Stuff complicating the Slytherins, since I don't believe the entire house could be evil. That said, I am not a Draco fan, nor am I interested in Harry/Draco.
  
• Dystopic AUs under Voldemort rule or backstory from the last time he was in power, preferably with a focus on the women instead of the Marauders.
  
• McGonagall being awesome.
  
• Stories about Hogwarts in the seventh book, particularly during the events when all we see in the book is Harry, Ron and Hermione in the forest. Students and professors rebelling, like in OotP, etc. Stories about Hogwarts right after the big climax in the end also good.
  
• Stories about the wizarding world recovering from Voldemort.
  
• Politics in the Ministry of Magic.
  
• What's going on in the rest of the world as Voldemort climbs to power again.
  
• Something really complicating the human vs. non-human dynamics in the books, especially re: the house elves.
  
• Female friendships in the books.

The next morning Katsa watched two children demonstrate how to stab each other, and had never been happier.

Your ancestors sang in the plantations. They danced after the sun went down. They would not be silenced.

It was harder to learn to be free than it had been to learn to be a slave. The rules were less clear.

Rejoice, aficionados, and gather 'round! -- it is with the utmost pleasure that we of the D.D. Drosselmeyer Literary Institute announce the discovery of a new manuscript.

It is Josei Seven's best selling issue of the year, and on the morning when it officially reaches the newsstands, LME's head offices receive an unprecedented amount of calls asking for verification or denial (or any comment at all) regarding Ren and Kyoko's suspected relationship.

Kanae gapes at her phone. "You're the heroine of a manga, aren't you?"

Once I thought hope was yellow, like the sunlight we never saw.

Ten years and lots of bleeding in between (figuratively, except when they run out of thimbles); ten years, and still more to come, Isabella knows.

Stitch shows her how to build plasma guns (Nani puts them on a high shelf), how to rig up a can opener and a radio into a machine that will open a portal to an alternate universe (Nani says she can't do it in the house) and how to first swallow and then regurgitate useful objects, like handcuff keys or quarters (Nani, though disgusted, can't help but be impressed).

And slowly, but surely, those raw edges healed, a little crookedly, like Ash's wound, inexpertly stitched and still painful to the touch, but healed nonetheless, and Lissar was more and more comfortable in her role in the castle.

She does not dream at night, or imagine a place where it is possible to be loved and be more than a pawn. Where it is possible to have a love that does not need to be broken or looked down upon, where politics and birth do not determine their fate, where it is possible to be happy and free.

But nothing he's heard helps, because right now, even in this dimly lit old servant's corridor, Sancia is breathtaking.

Her head is tilted back and she's smirking up at the man, so much confidence it makes his heart ache.

Kyoko's heart was racing happily. She had been invited to visit Moko at home! Their friendship was growing stronger and deeper before Kyoko's very eyes! Would they braid one another's hair? Perhaps she and Moko could give one another a makeover? Or! Or Moko might open her heart to Kyoko, and shyly share her secret thoughts!

"I tried to get into the movies once," Osaka replied. "It didn't work."

"You?!?" Yomi said with her mouth hanging open. "Did your parents try and get you in a commercial when you were a kid? Is your uncle a movie producer?"

"No, I just walked right up to the screen. But it turns out it's just a big piece o' cloth..."

She takes the postcard upstairs to her flat, then searches for the other two while the kettle heats up. She fills a French press and, while the coffee is brewing, pins all three postcards to the board above her desk, isolated a little apart from the clippings of Dieter's team and the take-out menus. And then, gazing at the three sketches, she unwraps the last of the bread from Paris, pours a cup of coffee, and tips five spoonfuls of sugar into her cup.

The sugar is sweet. The bread is good.

"Be quiet as you go up," says Cameron. "Sarah has not been sleeping well."

"Thanks," says Reese. "I don't want to be shot."

Cameron does not want him to be shot either. He would require medical attention. That would be bad. He might die. That would be worse. Cameron has not allotted time in her schedule for disposing of a body. She does not say this.

"Hobbes," Calvin says thoughtfully, perched on the sharply slanted roof outside his bedroom window. "Have you always been around?"

Hobbes looks very wise and takes a large bite of his tuna sandwich. His reply is muffled and incomprehensible around the food.

Calvin takes this to mean that Hobbes doesn't know, either.

"People who can be free shouldn't, and the ones that should are chained to the earth until it's too late," he said.

He wonders, sometimes, what freedom is worth, if he always returns to the same place; but Agrabah isn't just a place. For the brief and golden time that it exists (and relatively, for Genie, it is brief), it's home.

"Yes, you are here to help," she agrees amiably. Keep him engaged, throw any tall tale at the monster to pacify him. "My sister," second cousin on her mother's side, actually, but English does not have a specific word for that, "says that as well. She wishes..."

Until the world narrows to this, this point, this moment where she's standing by the harbor rocks, watching for ships at sea, blood-red clothes like a shout against the gray of sea and sky.

Chikage had picked an agricultural chemicals company that traded on the Nisei because according to him, it looked lonely. Tachibana set up a computerized trading account and bought him four shares, and that should have been that.

And then he really was done. He swallowed. Goodbye uncomfortable metal slab, he thought. Goodbye Knit-Wit magazine and the sweet smell of yarn and the soft click-click-click that needles made when you got into a rhythm. Goodbye fresh crisp checks in the mail.

I heard the tale told once in Cereus House where I spent my childhood, of how proud Azza and cruel Kushiel wagered a province between them for a night spent in Naamah's arms.

The square flat box, blue with green stripes, held a couple of egg rolls, some boiled vegetables, and a patch of rice with a pig's face drawn onto it with gome seeds.

Years after Coffee Princess proves as big a hit as Coffee Prince, they'll be sitting in Han Kyul and Eun Chan's living room after dinner, and Han Sung will say, "Why don't you make the coffee, Han Kyul? Your wife must be sick of it, after doing it all day."

Hypnotized by this strange sight, Crehador forgot the terrible suspicion which had brought him to this place, and watched as Cain, with a languorous sigh, let a single drop fall upon his small pink tongue.

She was an unprepossessing sight that year, sulky mouth dominating her bony young face and straggles of greasy curls covering her eyes and her grimy cheeks - a year or two too young for the whorehouse but that was the most you could say.

We spilled entrails and we rejoiced, and I could no longer tell where I ended and you began. Have you read your secret in me? Do you play a deeper game?

Nanatsusaya... am I your master? Or am I but your mistress?

Kira has always liked the taste of cigarettes. He fancies that cancer is a spice, noxious and thickly sweet, one more forbidden fruit in a corrupt life.

On the way back, before you push the doors open, you can never stop yourself from wondering if the world ended while you were sleeping; if all you'll find above are the remnants of a holocaust, screaming shadows blasted onto bleached walls, or piles of corpses still bleeding from their open mouths.

On their 18th birthday, each Nightshade woman is sat down by her mother - or, if her mother is fortunate enough to have been dismembered, eviscerated, set on fire, or otherwise deceased, another suitable Nightshade female - and given the Last Rites.

No, not the quaint little Catholic custom; this is a purely Nightshade tradition, handed down from each firstborn female.

liviapenn

Her first husband, she initially thought, had joined the masters. He marched out and had not returned, he died with his oppressors. His friends were forced to the fight just as he was but--Persia! Blessed Persia!--they had run, they had fled and joined the liberators. They were free; she could imagine them with gold and silver, bronze and myrrh.

The mountains are a ring of teeth surrounding the city, sharp and broken and impassable in most places. They have, at different times in the city's history, been shield and sword, cocoon and cage, boon and bane.

His fingers are rough, the tips calloused. Underneath, she feels the lingering traces of soft hands and hesitance, and she arches into his touch, willing the dream to fade.

Foxes always know where to find good paper. It's because they hang out with scholars so much of the time.

As the stove began to heat up, he set to work on the tiny lives swarming within the kettle's water, releasing them each as it came closer and closer to boiling.

It was easier to make tea when one considered all the deaths required.

Death stared at the jug. It had a little porcelain udder, complete with four ineptly paint-splotched teats. The milk, however, was clearly meant to pour out a hole in its nose. Nanny Ogg did not seem to find it out of the ordinary.

Life as an occasionally anthropomorphic personification of an imaginary land means not having a particularly subtle subconscious.

Harry's brother, Richard (who kept his honor so close Corlath at first mistook it for disapproval), spent much of his time in those long halls.

"Cats know things," I inform him, smugly. It's true; we do. We hear more than people imagine. "Didn't you know, there is a feline Torah, and these are the stories we yowl to one another at night in the alleys of the city."

You follow a trail of shining pebbles, or maybe they are candy eggs, the kind that taste of sugar and cream and fruit from the summer's first harvest, the kind that witches tempt children with. Even in a dream you know better than to stop and taste one, just to see.

xsmoonshine

• Stories Darkness Tells You, by thuviaptarth (Fray) - Harth and Melaka and the monsters within. I love the flow of this one and how informed by fairy tales it is, particularly the fairy tales in which evil sisters chop off their toes and girls in red shoes dance themselves to death.
  
  Excerpt: When they were very small, they slept in the same bed and dreamed the same dreams; this stopped when they grew big, when the girl began to acquire curves and the boy began to get his height, when the girl began to run with dangerous men and the boy began to dream true.



• Blood and Ink, by edonohana (Lloyd Alexander's Westmark trilogy) - It's Theo before, during, and after he becomes the Kestrel, and it touches on the very things that I love most about the Westmark trilogy: what wars do to people, what people do about wars, and what happens when the war is over. I love the voices, both of the characters and of the narration (sausages!), and I love that Theo and Mickle are still trying to figure it all out.
  
  Excerpt: "It's only ink on paper," said Justin.
  
  "So is a constitution," said Florian.

• Apocalypses and Other Fairy Tales (Keys remix), by yhlee - It's Fred and Willow after the apocalypse, and they've only got each other. Another dark fairy tale, this time in Yoon's dream-like prose. I really like that Yoon doesn't forget that Fred is a woman who lived in a cave for years and that she is a survivor, not just the cute and girly love interest that she so often is on the show.
  
  Excerpt: Once upon a time, there lived a girl in a cave. The girl was clever and the girl was quick, and no matter what monsters came after her, the girl always got away.



• What Will Be Told (the Gospel remix), by minnow1212 - I lied. Feathers, Lightsabers, and Lead wasn't my only favorite remix; this is the other. I have been waiting all week for the reveal just so I could squee about this and make other people read it! I got to beta this, which largely involved my reading every other paragraph, looking up, and then swearing, "Damnit! Why can't I write like this?"
  
  sullensiren's A Path Unvaried is an awesome story, and minnow1212 takes her story and adds to it so that it becomes the seed for myth and legend and folklore, which brings it right back to Sandman, which has always been about the power of Story. I love all the different narrative forms in the story -- gospel and talk show interviews and children's rhyming games. Brilliantly executed and highly recommended.
  
  Excerpt: Many stories are told of Prez Rickard: some documented, some plausible, some contradictory, some clearly impossible. (Some of the documented ones are false; some of the impossible ones are true. This is the way of stories.)