(meme)

[raven]

So I have concrud for the third time this year (my life, you guys! so hard! cons are so exciting and multiply amazing and infectious!) and so I steal a meme from alpheratz:

You post a topic, list, category, whatever, in comments. (examples: "Five Dates X Regretted Going On," or "Five Fannish Gatherings that Y Attended"). I'll answer with a list of five things.

Fandoms: Welcome To Night Vale (quelle surprise), M*A*S*H, Cabin Pressure, Vorkosigan, Sports Night, etc., but the whole list is here and I'm usually happy to write most of them.

Comments

[hannah]

Five best eyebrow-raising scenes from the Vorkosigan saga.

[raven]

1. The dinner party. Oh, the dinner party. (I was kind of tempted to cheat by giving five individual incidents from the dinner party!) Bonus points for Miles's, "May I introduce you to - SHE'S RUNNING AWAY!"

2. The tiny moment at the beginning of Memory where Miles first considers writing the doctored report about what happened to Vorberg. I was reading it for the first time without spoilers but was still "...no, Miles, no, this is A TERRIBLE IDEA NO".

3. The bit in Cordelia's Honor where Piotr tries to sneak in to sabotage Miles's replicator. I was never quite on board with the later reconciliation - I mean. I mean, he tries to kill him!

4. Roic, half-naked, covered in bug butter, defending the honour of House Vorkosigan! Yes.

5. And, finally, Illyan's drunken confession to Ivan in CVA about where the best collection of terrible porn in the Imperium used to be stored. Owwwww, I feel bad for him.

[soupytwist]

*huuuuugs*

I would like: Five Times Carlos Surprised Cecil, and/or Five Bits of Headcanon you have about the Vorkosigan saga. (Or Night Vale, if you would prefer. :D )

five times Carlos surprised Cecil (wild dreams of a new beginning)

[raven]

1. There were the little surprises, such as how Carlos remembered every individual thing he’d learned or been told and then put them together in logical but surprising and innovative, almost as though that were something he did for a living: like how he knew that Cecil liked sweet things, the stickier and more nutritionally worthless the better, and that he sometimes got engrossed in City Council press releases and reports of mysterious creatures in the groundwater and forgot to eat lunch, and so Cecil opened up one of his files of notes for his show to find a packet of Red Vines dropping out, or Reese’s peanut butter cups, or cookies with dark chocolate and sea salt. (Carlos liked salt; it reminded him of the ocean, he said, and in tasting it Cecil tasted something of Carlos himself, an outlying ingredient in the comfortably sweet and familiar, unusual but good.)

2. And then they had been talking, idly, one night on the porch in the warm evening, and Cecil had been hesitantly remembering something he read years ago in college, something sparse, expressed in poetry. It spoke of water in the desert, and stayed under Cecil's skin. And then it was there, a slim volume on his doorstep, and perhaps it might have been a bigger thing than a little one – the bookstores in town had trouble with non-occult titles and Amazon had trouble with non-integer zip codes – and Cecil read it late into the night, slowly, rocking back and forth, watching the hooded figures drift past the porch, thinking about salt on his skin, and the ocean.

3. Cecil talked a little too much about angels, and Pink Floyd was the weather, that evening. He took the painkillers he had in the house and walked to the door, with purposeful steps, watching his hands shaking, and he found Carlos in the wet, squelching process of driving his perfect and beautiful knuckles into the secret policeman's mouth, and Cecil didn't have to be re-educated that night, after all.

(Later, that was less surprising; later he came to recognise that look in Carlos's eyes that meant something was about to be differentiated and integrated with violence. Cecil had never been defended like that before; he was a pacifist, still water running deep in him, but there was something small and secretly satisfying about being loved like that, in such full, bruising colour.)

4. The less said about the Annual Parade of the Mysterious Hooded Figures (and, Cecil, please, you have to understand, Its Possibilities For Scientific Inquiry) the better. Cecil found the cowled cape wadded up in his bathroom laundry basket and resolved never to speak of it.

5. But those were all things that happened before the grant funding ran out, and Carlos started getting cell phone reception again, and began wondering aloud how many pizza delivery flyers, threats to cut off his phone service and entreaties to donate to his alumni organisation one small mailbox in northern California could really hold. Cecil is sitting on a front step which belongs to Larry Leroy, on the edge of town, and he's been sitting there all day so Dana has had to do the show from the dog park, distorted but chipper. Larry has brought him gluten-free pie and Dana has said kind things in her broadcast, and neither of them have mentioned anything about distant oceans, or people with perfect hair.

It's just a little thing. It's a flutter of dust at the horizon, at the far end of the long road while the radio says welcome to Night Vale. There's a long time while the little thing gets bigger and bigger but not quite recognisable, so there's that traitor surprise somewhere in Cecil's chest, beneath his solar plexus, that fades into something warm and glowing, and larger than himself and the space of his body, large enough to encompass oceans. Carlos gets out of the car and says, "I came back."

"I knew you would," Cecil says, and takes his hand, and they walk back into town, under the sky black with coal-dust, with chances of indigo.

Re: five times Carlos surprised Cecil (wild dreams of a new beginning)

[hedda62]

Oh, oh, this is lovely. Non-integer zip codes! Carlos punching the secret policeman! Wonderful.

Re: five times Carlos surprised Cecil (wild dreams of a new beginning)

[minttown1]

#3 is the best thing I've read in this fandom, hands down. I am shaking.

I don't mean to imply that it isn't all amazing, because it is. But #3. Man.

Re: five times Carlos surprised Cecil (wild dreams of a new beginning)

[thingswithwings]

aw aw aw! This is so beautiful! When Carlos punches the Sheriff's Secret Police Officer! And Cecil is taking his painkillers and is a pacifist, *flail* *flail* *flail* And then the ending, oh, my heart.

INCOHERENCE

Re: five times Carlos surprised Cecil (wild dreams of a new beginning)

[soupytwist]

I have now read this about fifteen times and oh, it's lovely. NON INTEGER ZIP CODES. And the Annual Parade, yessssssssssss. And somehow "with chances of indigo" is just the only possible perfect way to end this. Wonderful.

[thingswithwings]

Aw, sorry for your concrud! That is unfair.

How about a list of five friends Carlos makes in Night Vale? :)

five friends Carlos makes in Night Vale

[raven]

Five friends Carlos made in Night Vale.

1. Old Woman Josie. Carlos had gone to visit the angels, who weren't home. "It's just a visitation," Josie said, sagely. "Fear not. You want some tea, honey?"

Carlos was going to say something about having to go somewhere and do science, because his default setting in Night Vale was always run run away quickly come back with a hazmat suit and take measurements also but run, which was tiring and cognitively dissonant but effective, but he stopped and looked around him properly, at the little room with the books piled up on all the surfaces, children's literature mixed up with books about high-energy physics mixed up with bell hooks, and then at the little lady with her eyes bright as tiny stars. "Yeah, okay," he said, and sat down while she made it, breathing in the scent of spices.

"There you go," she said, putting the tiny cup directly into his hands. "Drink that. White people can't make tea for shit."

Carlos laughed, surprising himself. "I know," he said. "Where do you get this stuff, in Night Vale?"

"You come here and drink it, honey." Josie's eyes were alive with mischief. "Nice to have a beautiful, perfect young man around the place."

Carlos blushed, but he was still sitting there, calm and quiet, half an hour later, when Erika shouted "Be not afraid!" and the room exploded with light.


2. Tamika Flynn. "I heard," she said very quietly, looking up at him with wide, fearful eyes, "that scientists get to read a lot of books."

Carlos had two kid sisters at home, and his mom was writing her thesis when the second one arrived so Roxy's first words were "mama" and "dada" and "sulphur". He got on his knees to be at her eye level and said, seriously, "You must be Tamika."

She nodded. "Are you the scientist?"

Carlos considered. "I'm a scientist," he said at last. "They always need more. There are a lot of things in the world to understand, you see."

She nodded.

"Tell you what," Carlos said. "If you sit up here – let me give you a hand up – and make some notes for me, we can maybe do some work together, okay? I'm not very good at writing without pens, not like you."

She nodded again. "Is the sky blue, where you come from?"

"Sometimes," Carlos said. "Sometimes it's grey, or black."

"That's weird." She wrinkled her nose, than unwrinkled it. "And interesting."

"It's very interesting," Carlos said. "What colour is the sky here?"

"Red," Tamika told him, and Carlos began taking notes. "And purple, and green, and sometimes dusty and cerulean. Let me write that, 'cerulean' is hard to spell."

Carlos grinned and gave her the clipboard.


3. The Glow Cloud. "It's kind of disgusting," spat Amy, picking a dead lizard out of her hair. She'd been with Carlos since the beginning of the Night Vale investigation project, and Carlos knew for a fact she was keeping a meticulously-empirical record of the shifting relative meaning of the word "disgusting" in connection with Night Vale-based phenomena.

"Why does everyone in Night Vale enjoy stating the obvious?" he asked, rhetorically, closing the windows they'd foolishly left open even after Welcome To Night Vale had spent five minutes reminding them of the agenda for that night's PTA meeting (the reading of the minutes for the previous meeting; how to encourage fresh fruit and vegetables be a part of children's packed lunches; the unutterable ennui of existence).

"Not the lizard," she said. "Though, yes, watching lizard entrails spiral counter-clockwise down my shower drain is disgusting, thank you, Carlos. And the dead locusts. Dead pigeons also pretty gross. What is disgusting here is the rank – aha, I made a pun, I am hilarious - favouritism."

"I'm sorry," Carlos said, for no reason at all, because it wasn't his fault, really, and started building a funeral pyre for the dead kittens and puppies and single, startled bunny rabbit.


4. Intern Dana. When Cecil announced she was okay, and alive, and living in the dog park (that we do not acknowledge or speak about) with the man in the tan jacket, Carlos was relieved – he liked her and sometimes suspected that she might be the most rational person in Night Vale, Cecil most definitely and emphatically not excepted – and then worried for her life, which as she was one of Cecil's interns wasn't exactly new, but he could do something about it.

After a few minutes, the five-pack of Cheetos returned over the dog park fence emptied and opened out with "thanks send more" scrawled on it.

Carlos went to get some more, and also some of Amy's patented all-vitamin all-mineral all-caffeine writing-your-thesis pills, and some fresh fruit and vegetables. He wrote "don't you need carbohydrate?" on the wrapper in a toothpick dipped in food colouring; he got it back with "thanks a bunch Carlos you're the best pop tarts please? Erika makes me eat quinoa hippie shit".

Under the Kellogg's logo, Carlos wrote: "no problem how did you know it was me?"

"faint smell of Cecil's cologne also chocotastic beautiful and perfect"

Carlos nodded, to no one, and went to find a non-shatter French press.


5. The angel Erika. It was funny, observed the part of Carlos's mind that was really definitely seriously not panicking right now, that even with glow-cloud possession and that terrible sandstorm and station management continuing to do their thing, he had never, not in the world or on the radio, heard Cecil scream until this moment.

"Carlos," Cecil said a moment later, backing slowly through the door with a strange light playing across his face, "there's someone in the bathroom. Look," he said, in the direction of the door, "there are some guys out there who can, like, have babies, but I'm not one of them, so I don't think…"

He stepped back inside. Carlos leaned against the wall and waited. After a minute Cecil came back out and looked at him. "Apparently," he said, sounding in equal parts confused and put out, "I should be nice to you. I should be very nice to you. Otherwise some – ah, bad things, are going to happen to me, involving shrieking in the pits of hellfire. Also I should be not afraid. Why shouldn't I be afraid, when I'm being threatened?" A little uncertainly, "And I… am nice to you, aren't I?"

"You are the nicest," Carlos told him, kissing his forehead. He went into the kitchen to sweep out some dead cats left over from the early evening PTA meeting, murmuring his thanks, knowing they would be heard by one or another Erika wherever zie might be; and after that he made spiced tea for Cecil, for both of them, and laughed into his own cup.

Re: five friends Carlos makes in Night Vale

[thingswithwings]

YES I WAS SECRETLY HOPING FOR CARLOS BEING SCIENCE AND LEARNING FRIENDS WITH TAMIKA WITH THAT PROMPT

YOU ARE THE BEST

*ahem*

These are all lovely, though. I especially like the idea of Carlos having quiet tea with Old Woman Josie and relaxing just enough to not itch for a hazmat suit anymore (right before the Erika shows up). Plus your Erika characterization (be not afraid!) is hilarious and awesome. And the terrifying manner in which the Glow Cloud loves him! These are just GEMS. And I like how they end with Carlos being the blase tea-making one, bless.

Re: five friends Carlos makes in Night Vale

[minttown1]

This is so good. Ugh. I love it.

This is entirely up to you, but would you mind my posting a link to this on tumblr? Or are you planning to publish elsewhere? Because this is perfect and beautiful and people should get to read it.

[hedda62]

I haven't finished NIght Vale yet, so... how about five weather reports for Vorbarr Sultana?

Five weather reports for Vorbarr Sultana (with apologies to Night Vale public radio)

[raven]

1. Cold. A replicator in ImpMil under armed guard. The lights blinking, on, and off, and on, and off. Risk of snow.

2. Stormy weather. Rumours of heads falling.

3. A return. A lie. Ice water.

4. A quiet sky, curling with firework smoke. Distant smells of maple ambrosia and contentment.

5. Grey skies from the city up to the lake. Six pallbearers.

[jamjar]

Five pets owned by a Vorkosigan.

[ladymercury_10]

Oh no! Feel better!

How about five times Kaylee Frye fixed something?

[silverhare]

I'd quite like the Five Favourite Flights of Arthur Shappey.

five favourite flights of Arthur Shappey

[raven]

1. Well, there's Paris. Paris is always fun. Arthur likes the up-and-then-down quality of it, so one minute they're in Fitton, which is green, and pretty, and although he'd never quite say so, for fear of hurting people's feelings, especially Mum's, she's been living in Fitton for years so maybe she might take it to heart, a little bit boring, and then they're in Paris, which is sort of green in some places and pretty too, in a much busier, more exciting way, and, well. It is exciting, to be in one place and then another in the same length of time it takes to heat up a couple of admiral's pies and serve two cups of coffee (per passenger, not between everyone; they don't have cups that big). He doesn't think he'll ever quite get used to it. Not that he'd want to.

2. There was that very short flight from Osaka to Kyoto, the one when Arthur discovered sushi. (The catering options form had been in Japanese, or at least that's what Skip said it was – it looked like perfect line drawings of houses and forests – so he ticked things at random and hoped for the best.) "It's brilliant," he told Skip, opening the trays, "it's like food, only smaller and better" – and for a moment Skip looked like he wanted to say something else, but he only laughed and said, "I suppose it is."

3. And then there's the places in Russia, the faraway eastern places like Vladivostok and Magadan. Douglas and Skip hate those flights, they say they take too long and it's really boring, and Arthur can kind of see their point, but secretly he really likes it. Those are always cargo flights, no passengers (and he asked Mum why, once, and she said maybe he should look it up in a tourist guide to Magadan, and he couldn't find one, and come to think of it that may have been her point) so he doesn't have a lot to do once Douglas and Skip have had their dinner, just sitting in one of the seats closest to the windows watching the forests and the mountains go past, lit up by the lights of tiny villages that must be so tiny, just a sprinkle of houses and maybe one shop selling toothpaste and bags of flour and things like that, but he likes how he can see them from so far away and above, shining as they go past one by one, like a sequence of stars.

4. The most exciting flight he's ever taken was from Kathmandu to Leh. "Wasn't it brilliant," he said to Mum later, "I've never seen mountains so close, gosh" – and then he had to go and get her a glass of water, and wait for her to come out of the bushes at the edge of the airfield, when she'd finished being sick.

5. And then – well, Arthur's not stupid. He is, sometimes, but not about things that matter, and MJN is something that matters. He understands, has understood right from the beginning when Mum got the call from her solicitor and had to lean against the wall in relief for a while, that there's only so long that they can keep on doing this. Douglas and Martin do their best and so does everyone else they meet, really, but they haven't got an awful lot of money at the best of times, though they do try not to use too much fuel, and eat tinned food. So one day they'll have to stop, and Arthur's not too worried about that – maybe he can help Skip out with removals, he's sure you need two people to move a piano if you want to do it more than once – and in the meantime this is a flight he's taking through a different sort of life, from a past that wasn't that great at the time, really, though you shouldn't be glad your dad has gone, to a future that's going to be better but might not have all these daily wonders, like the sight of the sunshine glittering off the top surfaces of the clouds, like easy flying through clear skies, so they start their descent with everything laid out in front of them, miniature and perfect, just waiting for them to land.

[cosmic_llin]

Five Times Margaret Houlihan Was Really Proud of Herself.

five times Margaret Houlihan was really proud of herself

[raven]

1. Right from the very beginning, she resolved to make the best of it. And having resolved to make the best of it, she made the best of cockroaches in the shower and scratching noises inside her tent; she made the best of Hawkeye Pierce and his Groucho Marx impersonations and his frightening disregard for everything and everyone; she made some clear-eyed decisions, her first night in camp, about herself and what she wanted and where she wanted to be, and made the best of Frank Burns.

The cockroaches scuttled out of the drain; the rats scurried into the shadows; Pierce and McIntyre set fire to the latrines; Frank Burns had no lips. And one day about ten weeks into the life of the MASH 4077th, quite in passing, Radar said something to Colonel Blake in her hearing about "the highest efficiency rating in Korea".

Much later she would think of the joke – Margaret Houlihan made the best of it – and laugh, and be proud again even at the distance of years and thousands of miles, but at that moment she leaned against the wall in Colonel Blake's outer office and thought about all of them, the young men in post-op, where it was clean and well-lit and nothing scurried, where the best was yet to come.

*


2. "This is a medical unit, son, no one points a weapon here," Potter was saying, and Radar was running through the double doors to get Captain Hunnicutt and the other patients were gasping in horror then, one by one, though they had been taking the smallest steps they could take, Hawkeye and Father Mulcahy had their backs against the wall.

She wondered where he'd got the gun.

"My son, think about what you're doing," Mulcahy was entreating, and Hawkeye was saying nothing but with his hands by his sides, fingers curled, studiedly peaceful, and Margaret was thinking confusedly about how much she loved all of them for what they were and despised them a little for what they were and then, a very few moments later, when she was sitting on the edge of one of the beds holding the gun and BJ was leading Private Rolf away to bed and calling one of the other nurses for a sedative, she said: "Someone had to do something."

"Thank you," Hawkeye said, his hands still by his sides and shaking, and she thought: for doing what you can't do.

*


3. "And then," BJ said, "and then one of the Marines said – look, I know you didn't want a blow-by-blow account" – a pause, as Potter, Hawkeye and Margaret all winced – "but this part is important. The Marine came up to me and said… well." He trailed off uncomfortably. "He said, uh, something about my wife. And then Major Houlihan – she hit him, uh, pretty hard. She was provoked!" he added, hastily.

Potter sighed. "Before I came to this infernal place I might have said I never expected three of my officers brought up before me for brawling. But as things never do turn out how we expect and the good Lord works in mysterious ways, I'm going to say instead that, of my three officers brought up before me for brawling, I never expected you to be one of them. Major Houlihan, do you have anything to say for yourself?"

Margaret saluted. "Next time I'll hit him harder."

There was dead, perfect silence.

"But, Colonel Potter, sir," she added, softening, "I'll pay for the table."

*


4. The stupid thing was that it wasn't that she'd had a letter from her mother, talking about her neighbour's grandchildren; it wasn't because of the new nurse who had just transferred from the 8063rd, eagerly showing the girls her ring, twisting it around and around on her finger; it wasn't BJ passing around a new snapshot of his daughter, smiling through a faceful of strawberry jam, although all of those were things that had happened. It was just her walking through the compound, late one night after finishing her shift in post-op, through the evening air that felt, for the first time, of frost; it was just a quiet moment of realisation that if she chose, she would never see him again; that he was under curved sunny skies in Honolulu right now, and he wasn't thinking of her.

She stopped by the Swamp, staying outside the door. She said, "It's getting cold, you'll have to roll down the flaps" and uncharacteristically Hawkeye didn't jerk upwards with a start so she seemed to see him as a stranger for a moment, still indistinct through the blur of canvas.

"Margaret," he said, into his pillow, and she said, before she could lose her nerve: "Hawkeye, I need you."

"In post-op?" he asked, already reaching for his boots, and she held up a hand to steady him.

"To drink with," she said, "and maybe, to talk…" – and the last word was so quiet, perhaps he hadn't heard it, but he got up, opened the door to let her in, started looking for a couple of glasses.

"Tell me," he said, very quietly; he wasn't looking directly at her.

"My husband," she said, incoherently, "who isn't, any more…" – and then she trailed off.

Something about him sharpened for a moment; she saw something knowing in his eyes when he turned back towards her, and then he blurred back into indolence and there was a drink in her outstretched hand. The gin tasted clean and cathartic; the oncoming chill felt like a harbinger of change. She wondered how many friends Donald Penobscott had, under that sunny Hawaiian sky.

*


5. Then comes afterwards.

First, she does nothing. She walks around barefoot, she watches people walking along the street below her window. She lies on top of the covers in her tiny apartment, just breathing in the clean air, waiting for it to replace the dust in her lungs. And then she spends two weeks just visiting – her parents, old friends from nursing school, girls she trained with who are married now, or have toddlers calling out for Auntie Margaret, or who wear crisp linen, take crisp charge of wards and community practices and emergency rooms. And then there are another two weeks while she learns how to do one kind of job and unlearns how to do another, gets used to bright lights and small-time hurts, slipped nail guns and children coming off swings.

And then one day she thinks about calling in sick, and doesn't; and then there's another day, not very much later, that she takes as leave for no reason at all. She fills up her car with gas at a tiny filling station towards the edge of the city; she asks the guy there how far she has to drive to reach the ocean. He looks at her a little strangely, but he tells her and then she gets back in the car and starts driving, crossing all the miles to open water with the windows rolled down and the wind upsetting the perfection of her hair. She walks slowly along the shoreline, picking her way through bladderwrack and seashells, until she's gone far enough to be tired. She remembers suddenly that Hawkeye told her, once, about the house he was born in, on a hill smashed by Atlantic breakers, windows open to their spray. She hasn't written to him yet, but she will; there are no unexploded landmines in Maine, no shells dropping from the unclouded sky. There's time.

She turns and looks out at the sea and thinks, simply, of survival. She made it here, step by step over uncertain ground: unmarried, unfettered, with the salt air alive with promise, with the best yet to come.

[philomytha]

Ooh, this is a good meme, I might have to borrow it. In the meantime, how about Five Times Illyan Nearly Resigned?

five times Simon Illyan nearly resigned

[raven]

five four times Simon Illyan nearly resigned (and then it was too late)

1. When the Emperor brought him in to explain the procedure, detailed what was going to happen to him as though reciting recipes or troop movements, he had been very calm; and then the journey to Illyrica had been long, long enough for board games with the other officers being sent to have the operation done (the reports referred to them as experimental subjects, but reading the reports gave him palpitations, so he perfected his tacti-go skills and began learning to play chess); and then he had been calm when the doctors and researchers set it all out, what he might expect, what had happened in previous phases of the experiment (there was that word again); and then the darkest hour was before the dawn and in the morning he was calm, looking out of his hospital window at Illyrica's slightly greenish sky and waiting for them to come for him.

It was on the way to the operating theatre, under some kind of pre-sedation that felt like soft restraint, as though he were on the edge of being terminally not very calm at all, that he decided he wanted to jump off the moving gurney, propose marriage to the nurse pushing it and depart Imperial Service forever, taking himself and his new, beautiful wife on adventures throughout known space; he had got as far as a vertiginous six inches from horizontal, his lips forming into nurse, listen – before he quite stopped being able to think at all.

(Later, those final days would fade, become something that had happened to someone else, so he would only clearly remember that green sunrise, and meet the nurse afterwards as a stranger.)

2. Of course it made no sense, not at all. The changeover from a ferociously able and fair-minded Imperial Regent to the tentative rule of a young Emperor in his own name was no relief to a Chief of Imperial Security – quite the reverse, in fact, as those who'd never quite dared try it suddenly dared try it – and his desk, obsessively neat for the most part, was getting a distinct layer of clutter.

But Simon was working late, glancing at reports so the text would be in his memory for later cross-reference, and thinking about his grandfather, who had had a market garden in Vorkosigan's District, growing potatoes and carrots with citrus fruit under glass. Gregor, he was thinking, could hardly do a worse job than his father had; Simon's grandfather had done the best job he could, turning over soil with a bent trowel while the Cetagandans streaked overhead up into the hills. Simon ordered up the title deeds for the land just to see his own name written in his grandfather's cramped, shaking hand, and then left them sitting on his desk, balanced precariously between in-tray and out-tray, and they was still there, five or ten minutes later, when he got to the subsection of the current report entitled "Count Vordrozda, his influence".

(When they let him out of prison he got a small tree in a pot, and it wilted and griped in the variable heat and windowlessness of his office, but fruited nevertheless, so two weeks out of the year he could sit at his desk and smell lemons.)

3. "Please tell me," Simon said, very carefully, "that the business of Imperial government was not just brought to an entire standstill because an eleven-year-old child gave his foster-brother, the Emperor, a birthday present that ticks."

"It was his birthday," said his agent on the scene, helplessly, "and it was what he asked for."

(It was an old Earth pocket watch, with real clockwork; Gregor loved it.)

(It was Simon's birthday, too.)

4. And then Miles was missing, and it was, because it didn't matter what anyone told him when he had an inner certainty as steady as a star, his fault; and he thought about resigning, a lot during those strange blurred days, but never more fiercely than in the morning, seized with that traitorous hope, even as his rational mind pointed out that if there had been good news overnight, they would have woken him up. He insisted on taking the news, the non-news, to Cordelia and Aral personally, wishing for personal rather than personally, as though he could carry that news as a friend.

(Later, Miles was dead, not missing. He gave the news to Cordelia and Aral with his hand on his insignia, sharp-edged beneath his fingers, metal at his throat.)

5. He'd been raised to mind his manners. Stop fidgeting, Simon, and look people in the eye. After the funeral, he was drawing patterns in the scattered earth with his toe, talking into the ground, but Alys was kind; he remembered as from a great distance that she loved him, and was grateful.

"You know," he said, presently, "I used to be the luckiest man in the Empire."

"How was that?" she asked, gently. She was so close he could smell her perfume, a comfort in the bleakness.

"I only had to do one thing, and I would be free." He shrugged, a little helplessly. "Other men had such variegated responsibilities, such intricate ties. I wasn't even commissioned, it was a political appointment. I could sign my name to my letter of resignation, pre-drafted, and I could take a jump-ship to – well, to anywhere."

"You never did," Alys said.

He looked up at her and smiled, a little wanly. "No. No, I never did."

"Almost as though" – her tone, and her hand cupping his cheek, were delicate – "you had someone holding you here, all along."

"Alys," he said, "I think I have to go somewhere, now. Be somewhere else. I couldn't go alone" – and as a declaration of something it was incoherent, and rough, but she took his hand, and she understood.

(They saw more of the galaxy together than they ever had apart, and on Escobar, under a morning sky, Simon remembered the nurse on Illyrica between two sips of a greenish lime cocktail; he laughed, and told Alys the story, and kissed her, citrus-sweet.)

[jennygriffee.livejournal.com]

Five episodes of M*A*S*H that Cecil and Carlos watched together. :)

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

tw non-graphic description of death in this one.

Five episodes of M*A*S*H Carlos and Cecil watched together (this is radio nowhere)

1. "To Market, To Market"

Carlos had thought Cecil wouldn't understand it. There were reruns on Night Vale television just like there were reruns everywhere else, but Carlos tended to see television sets in the town quiet and still, dusty to the touch. When he switched on Cecil started, as though only just at that moment alive to the idea of something outside Night Vale; he watched I Love Lucy and 30 Rock and The Daily Show all with the same bright-eyed anthropological wonder, tinged with wariness.

At the sound of the helicopters, Carlos turned. "We watched this a lot when I was growing up," he said, and they went to get takeout, watching Hawkeye and Trapper trade Henry's desk for a cache of penicillin over speakeasy pizza. On the television the desk swung below the chopper, and Carlos had a sudden memory of childhood, the family couch with its view of the adult world, hilarious and strange. Sitting beside him on another couch, holding Carlos's hand, Cecil laughed in the right places.

2. "Abyssinia, Henry"

And he cried in the right places, too; and although there was still some of the same wonder in him, there was understanding, too. Of course, Carlos thought, Cecil would understand that: living in a world of sideways violence, where bodies fell from the sky.

3. "No Sweat"

"There's a radio announcer, I like that," Cecil said, curling into Carlos on the couch, resting his head on Carlos's shoulder.

"Oh, that's not a radio," Carlos said, moving to give him more space. "That's a PA announcer."

"But you never see him," Cecil said, a little sleepily. "Even though sometimes he speaks when they're in the same room as the PA."

"Oh," Carlos said. "I guess you're right."

"That's what I like about radio," Cecil said, sounding more sleepy with each word, "it comes from nowhere. Even when you're nowhere, out in a tent on the edge of everything you ever thought you knew. Even when you're nowhere, you're not alone. You know. I mean, you know. Welcome to Night Vale."

Carlos said, "I love you."

4. "The Novocaine Mutiny"

Cecil, concentrating, asked: "Why do they call him Radar?"

On the television, Radar said: "Sometimes I know what's going to happen before it happens."

5. "Follies of the Living, Concerns of the Dead"

"Oh, God, I remember this," Carlos was saying, and on the television, the soldiers were gone in the mist, one by one, in their bare feet unseen. "Cecil, are you... are you okay?"

"I'm fine," Cecil said, although he didn't sound it, and then: "It doesn't look like that all the time. Only sometimes."

"Oh," Carlos said. He was feeling cold, suddenly. On the television the theme tune played long and slow, "Suicide Is Painless" in a minor key.

[bibliotropic.livejournal.com]

Sports Night, five on-air references to any of the rest of the list.