even the hour when wings are frozen

People Look East - Al Petteway & Amy White

So I was too crazy and busy and mostly crazy to upload my semi-usual selection of Christmas songs this year, and anyway this is an Advent song and therefore definitely too late, but since there's still technically time to listen to it on Christmas I am sharing. Almost every year I fixate on a particular traditional song, sometimes a particular rendition, and this song was everything to me for the past two months. (Even if they do add a bunch of extra and inferior verses, and make it less gender-neutral than the original.) I have sung it very quietly in public, walking down the street to the supermarket from the subway in the dark after a horrible horrible day, maybe not quietly enough but no one seemed to notice and I needed to not cry. I've sung it loudly at home while crying. So much traditional Christmas music is a metaphor for depression--for what you wish for, in a depression, knowing it'll never come--and what I needed more than anything over the last couple months, the last month especially, was to feel the way this song makes me feel.

(listen to it streaming at the tumblr version of this post)

yuletide recs, round one

I have now consumed everything in the Yuletide archive that it is possible for me to consume, except a few longer stories and all the Sleepy Hollow fics (all miiiillion of them) because I'm not quite caught up. This is sad because it means there's hundreds of stories I could be reading if only I'd kept up with my TV and media consumption over the last year, but good because omg I just spent an entire day Yuletiding and I am pretty tired. As the fruit of my labor, I bring you eight recs! First the one that has CHANGED MY LIFE, and then a cut. But they're all really excellent.

Get Up, and Go Forth (15344 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Kings
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Jack Benjamin/David Shepherd
Characters: Jack Benjamin, David Shepherd, Lucinda Wolfson
Summary:

Jack is well acquainted with failure.

So, a couple years ago I watched Kings, and I got really into it and then it HURT ME, like I seriously--there was damage. And I tried to fix it in a fic, but I couldn't, and I tried to fix it with a vid, but I couldn't, and it really upset me on a level way beyond "oh man, the ending really went off the rails, what a shame." That show fucking hurt me and I'm still really angry at it, and I still can't even deal. Like when there were some really great Kings vids for Festivids, I put off watching them for ages, then watched them, loved them, saved them, and have never been able to open them again. These are not the good feels we're talking about here, is what I'm saying. And this story healed me. It is exactly right and true, it's exactly what was needed, it's just really really good. The feedback I left was so embarrassingly effusive that it took up three AO3-size comments. This is the post-series Jack story of my heart forever, forever, forever, FOREVER. forever

( more Kings, Almost Human, Cowboy Bebop, The Stand, The Dark Tower, A Place of Greater Safety )