Lobelia the adverbially eclectic

Title: The Bucket List
Author: GallaPlacidia
Fandom: Harry Potter
Pairing: Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter
Posted: Jan-Feb. 2020
AO3 summary: Draco will die in six months if he can't get Harry Potter to fall in love with him. Since that's not going to happen, he might as well spend his last days working through his Bucket List. Tap-dancing lessons? Rock climbing? Poetry-writing? Threesomes? Cocaine? Getting to know his adorable cousin, Teddy Lupin? Draco will try them all!


Link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22431970

Me: Resonant, haunting, heart-wrenching, also: snappy dialogue and fabulous writing.

I am haunted by this fic. I stayed up from 4 to 6:30 in the morning, devouring this, and by the end I was completely destroyed.

This line: "Maybe all along, Draco Malfoy was a nude-modelling, tap-dancing, mountain-climbing gay adventurer." kjhasdjfajlksjkjiwoue

I laughed out loud into my pillow. Until I started weeping into my pillow.

Some of this is strangely resonant with this lockdown / post-lockdown world we inhabit now where we are all no longer gallivanting about the world. I note this was posted just a few weeks before lockdowns started in Europe.

At one point, I was actually ugly-sobbing. Only the promise of an HEA was keeping me going. Praise fandom for headers.

This is also so tender and so true. The desperate hope of all of us that if only our love were enough to keep someone alive. My friend died like this three years ago. She knew she would die; she knew she had a year to live. She became weaker and weaker, and had to have morphine, and finally stay in bed.

But oh, I needed these. Thanks to Cimorene and Isiscolo for reccing them!

No Refunds or Exchanges, by astolat
This has just the type of breezy pacing that I love, a zestful syntax that hurries on breathlessly and then stops short in a punch-to-the-gut final clause. There is sex and there is love and there is manliness. This is just so spot on!
Fandom: Stargate. (About which I know nothing beyond the fanon. Canon? What is that?)

A Long Time Looking by eliade
What I liked about this fic is the immersion in the real. There is the journey to the there (and you do get to a very breathless, gasmic there) but en route, you almost forget that there is a there and tarry with all the lovely observed details of street life, bookshop life, restaurant waitering and popcorn purchasing. Lovely dialogue, too.
Fandom: Sentinel. (Another canon that I know only through somebody's LJ summary thereof. Hah! At this rate, I shall never have to sully my hands with another canon ever again, I shall just live off fanons!)

Absurdity Theory by julad
I love this so much I could die of loving this. I have read it about four times and it makes me swoon with delirious pleasure. The dialogue, the pacing, the choice of words, the spot-on-ness of the punctuation even! Not to mention the drop-gorgeous sex and the chemistry sizzling between the two main characters, so that they immediately and irrevocably became one of my OTPs of all time (again, without me ever having had to go near a, what do they call that again? oh yes, a "canon").
Fandom: Stargate.

God, I've missed that woman's writing. Am too jetlagged what I love about it but I love it, I love it a lot. It's by eyebrowofdoom and it's Dorli and it's understated and straightforward at the same time, and so beautifully terse, and so beautifully Dorlish -- how I've missed the fridges full of beer and the 'oy, mates, let's fuck's. Somehow, they hardly ever drink beer in HP.