Title: Crowd control
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Ianto
Author: m_findlow
Rating: PG
Length: 942 words
Content notes: Spoilers for Big Finish audioplay “Outbreak”
Author notes: Written for Challenge 487 - Crowd
Summary: Ianto realises that the fate of the entire city now rests on his shoulders, and to make matters worse, everybody wants him dead.

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Fandom: The Clone Returns Home
Mods please use the f: movie (category) tag
Rating: T
Length: 100 words
Content notes: canonical major character death
Author notes: The title is from SOUVENIR by Rin Ishigaki, translated by Leith Morton, and IN THE CROWDED COUNTRY by K. Schippers, translated by Willem Groenewegen.
Summary: In which Takahara Kohei is still alive (for a few moments).

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Fandom: Sealomimi
Rating: general
Content notes: sheep
Artist notes: nobody said the crowd has to be sapient, right?
Summary: Mary laying in a herd of sheep.

Title: whirling
Fandom: City of Streamers (mods: you can use the Cdrama tag)
Pairing: Feng Shizhen/Rong Jiashang
Challenge: Crowd
Length: 100 words

Summary: glimpses through the crowd

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Sanders' young ladies' reader : embracing a comprehensive course of instruction in the principles of rhetorical reading : with a choice collection of exercises in reading, both in prose and poetry, for the use of the higher female seminaries, as also, the higher classes in female schools generally by Charles W. Sanders

A selection of prose and poetry intended for elocution classes. Interesting, nowadays, chiefly for the selections choosing. With an eye to variety, the preface assures us, because they are intended for the young.

This one is, unlike the fourth and fifth readers, aimed specifically at girls. Which means a couple on the education of women and the necessity of its being for their whole lives, and not the flurry of society to win their husbands, and more female characters in the stories. It has a couple of selections that overlap with those readers.

Title: Miss Marple Goes To The Sales
Fandom: Miss Marple
Rating: G
Length: 459 words
Summary: Miss Marple doesn't care for crowds, but sometimes they have to be endured

Title: Push and Pull
Fandom: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Author: veronyxk84
Characters/Pairing: Buffy/Spike
Rating: R
Warnings: Implied sexual situation (nothing is described on absolutely any level), dub-con (for the controversy of the OG balcony scene at the Bronze)
Word count: 200 (Google Docs)
Spoilers/Setting: Set in S6, during ep. 6x13 “Dead Things”
Summary: Buffy’s strongly conflicted about her situationship with Spike.
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction created for fun and no profit has been made. All rights belong to the respective owners.

Challenge: #487 Crowd
Also for: #161 Pull + #191 Balcony by anythingdrabble [Amnesty Week]

—
( READ: Push and Pull/Double drabble )

Fandom: Silmarillion
Pairings/Characters: Luthien/Maedhros
Rating: teen
Length: 66k
Creator Links: SpaceWall 
Theme: marriage of convenience, old fandoms, small fandoms, book fandoms, rare pairings, AU (fork in the road), pretend couple

Summary: Centuries after the arrival of the Noldor and the Teleri in Beleriand, a celebration of Morgoth’s defeat brings the Crown Princess of Doriath and the Crown Prince of the Noldor together. To save this newborn peace from their respective fathers, they’ll do whatever it takes. Including... getting married?

Meanwhile, Lord Fingon of Himring faces the monumental task of healing Morgoth’s ills.

--

They regarded each other with quiet understanding, all the vast majesty of their respective lineages rendered unimportant by the connection between them. Music wound through the trees; harp and flute, surely joyous in context, sounded lonely in their solitude.

Reccer's Notes: Fëanor is a very complex character in the Silmarillion, who both has reasons for what he does and also does some terrible things. Fanon tends to sympathize with him, and also make him a good father to compensate for his other issues. SpaceWall takes the opposite track, leaning into his selfishness, his arrogance, and his suspiciousness. And then asks, if he had survived on Beleriand, what would have happened? If Fëanor, brilliant and terrible, were in command of the Noldor? Some things are better, some things are worse, (and Thingol is still Thingol), and so at a crucial juncture Maedhros and Luthien step forward to try and prevent disaster and war between the Noldor and Sindarin. And, in the process, they both learn a great deal.

Fanwork Links: By Other Means

Fandom: Pride and Prejudice
Pairings/Characters: Kitty Bennet/Fitzwilliam Darcy
Rating: 106k
Length: teen
Creator Links: Shem 
Theme: marriage of conveneince, rare pairings, old fandoms, book fandoms, epic works, novel-length, AU, happy endings,

Summary: The day after the Netherfield Ball, a simple walk through the countryside has wide reaching consequences for Mr Darcy and a certain young lady from Longbourn.

Reccer's Notes: This is such an engaging look at a very different pairing and what might have been. It's long, plotty, with lots of good character work and a great slow burn.

Fanwork Links: To Bear is to Conquer Our Fate

Fandom: The Queen's Gambit (TV)
Pairings/Characters: Beth Harmon/Benny Watts
Rating: Explicit
Length: 138,010 words
Creator Links: paperclipbitch
Theme: marriage of convenience, future fic, slow burn, mutual pining, exes to friends to spouses to lovers, chess

Summary: “Don’t think of it as marriage,” Benny tells her. “Think of it as castling.”

Beth raises an eyebrow. “Am I the king or the rook in this analogy?”

Reccer's Notes: An amazing post-canon fic where Beth, frustrated by the period-typical sexism she keeps facing, marries Benny for convenience and now they’re stuck in a fake relationship full of unresolved tension, mutual pining, and all their messy issues (addiction, gambling, competitiveness). It’s smart, emotional, and so compelling. I loved every moment <3

Fanwork Links: you wait and you wonder who'll take on your odds

Fandom: Dark Shadows

Pairings/Characters: Angelique Bouchard/Barnabas Collins, Julia Hoffman, Nicholas Blair, other canon characters

Rating: Unrated; my best guess is T for violence

Length: ~11,000

Creator Links: Link to author's blog

Theme: marriage of convenience, backstory

Summary: The witch Angelique married numerous times throughout her long life and liaisoned even more times. Her great beauty ensured attracting anyone she could use and discard.

Reccer's Notes: Angelique owned many family names throughout the 5 year run of the show, and this story encompasses her entire life from childhood on. The convenient marriage is the one to Roger Collins while she is disguised as student of the occult Cassandra Blair. This story rocks because literally each of her identities receives insightful exploration, though the main "Pairing" consists of Angelique/Barnabas, the most well-known of her loves. She loves too well and not wisely at all.

Fanwork Links: Angelique (The Devil Need Not Own You)

A new fandom tag, please?

◊ sofa ♥ calm ♪ whoosh of properly functioning a/c Tags: fandom: dark shadows, length: 10.000 - 20.000 words, theme: backstory, theme: marriage of convenience

Title: Getting to Ray
Author: lucy_roman
Rating: Teen and up
Summary: After receiving a threatening letter Fraser has gone to find Ray
Pairing: Fraser/RayK
Word count: 566

( Getting to Ray )

Fandom: MCU
Pairings/Characters: Steve/Bucky, Sam/Steve
Rating: explicit
Length: 127k
Creator Links: ChibiSquirt 
Theme: marriage of convenience, pretend couple, happy endings, genderfuck

Summary: Sarah “Gwen” Rogers was nineteen when she married Bucky Barnes, and she knew at the time just how stupid it was: it wasn’t exactly a brilliant move to marry a man who could never love her, even—or especially—when she knew that she was in love with him.

Neither of them could have predicted the war that came, and if they had, then they sure as hell couldn’t have predicted what would happen when Gwen volunteered for Project: Rebirth.

Reccer's Notes: This is one of the more interesting Captain America genderswaps: what would it do to the essential closeness and devotion of Steve and Bucky's relationship if Bucky was 1000% gay, and Steve was a cis woman? But they still cared about each other as much? They decide to get married, to protect Bucky from gossip, and things go from there. This is such an interesting take on their relationship, on how being a cis woman would affect "Sarah" (especially once she wakes up in modern America after being frozen for seventy years), and her relationship with Sam. All while telling the basic events of the movie.

Fanwork Links: You Would Be In Clover

Title: tethered
Fandom: Thunderbolts* (MCU)
Characters: Robert "Bob" Reynolds & Yelena Belova
Rating: Teen
Length: 200 words
Content notes: hints at mental health issues
Summary: Bob gets lost in the crowd

( tethered )

Fandom: Star Trek AOS (Reboot)
Pairings/Characters: Kirk/Spock
Rating: Teen
Length: 4,249 words
Creator Links: waketosleep
Theme: Marriage of convenience

Summary: Kirk nearly turns a simple trade mission into a diplomatic incident. Luckily, Spock will do a lot to cover his captain's ass.

Reccer's Notes: What I love about Kirk and Spock is that there are so many different takes on who they are and how they'd act, and, in the hands of a good writer, every one of those is believable. In this story, Kirk is a totally obnoxious doofus who makes a major diplomatic blunder (as he does) and has to marry Spock to save face and a dilithium trade deal. Spock is tolerant and eye-rolly.

Kirk/Spock is one of my favorite pairings for marriages of convenience because these two are so married already, and they usually have a high degree of love (even if platonic) for one another at the time of the marriage. That quality is on display here.

This is the first story waketosleep wrote in this fandom. It's short and sweet, and worth revisiting even if you read it in 2009 when it was originally posted.

Fanwork Links: Strange Fits of Passion Have I Known

Fandom: Captain America
Pairings/Characters: Bucky/Peggy, Peggy/Steve, Steve/Bucky
Rating: teen
Length: 37k words
Creator Links: crackdkettle 
Theme: marriage of convenience, kidfic (has kids, accidental baby), pretend couple,

Summary: The Commandos find Bucky in a Hydra facility just days after Steve crashes. A few months later, Peggy comes to Bucky for help: she’s pregnant with Steve’s child and she wants him to claim the child as his so the SSR won’t experiment on it to try to crack Erskine’s formula. Over the next several years Bucky slowly learns how to navigate the life that was meant for Steve — as a husband, father, and founding member of SHIELD — while never giving up the search for the man he lost and still loves.

Reccer's Notes: I love the way crackdkettle handles Bucky and Peggy's mutual grief, and the different ways they handle it, and the slow course of their healing.

Fanwork Links: A Better Version of Our Past

Fandom: All About Eve
Pairings/Characters: Addison DeWitt/Eve Harrington
Rating: Gen
Length: 1634 words
Creator Links: AuKestrel 
Theme: marriage of convenience, future fic, kidfic (has kids), small fandom, old fandom, post canon,

Summary: You see, society and theatre (and aren’t they really the same thing? - someone, please, offer Mrs. Albert Knickerbacker her smelling salts) are built on the sand of lies: lies of omission, lies of commission, old-fashioned deceit, dishonesty, and compounded misunderstandings.

It takes only a rudimentary understanding and a halfway-capable grasp of human nature to begin to sift the truth from the lies.

Reccer's Notes: All About Eve is a classic 1950s drama about a young actress (Eve Harrington) who advances her career by playing a sweet innocent, attaching herself to an aging star (Margot Channing, played by Bette Davis), and stabbing her in the back. At the end of the movie, Eve marries a witty, snobbish, and super-queer-coded theater critic (Addison DeWitt). This is his perspective on their marriage and their daughter. The narrative voice is very strong, it feels like the movie.

Fanwork Links: Till I have the possession of everything she touches

Mods, can I get a fandom tag?

Title: Noticed
Fandom: BtVS
Author: badly_knitted
Characters: Willow, Oz.
Rating: PG
Word Count: 400
Spoilers/Setting: Season Two & Three.
Summary: Willow had always thought of herself as ordinary, but Oz makes her feel special
Content Notes: None needed.
Written For: Challenge 487: Crowd.
Disclaimer: I don’t own BtVS, or the characters.
A/N: Quadruple drabble.

◊ my desk ♥ tired Tags: by: badly_knitted, c: crowd, f: buffy the vampire slayer

Fandom: Stargate Atlantis
Characters/Pairings: John Sheppard/Rodney McKay, Jeannie, other OCs like John's cousin, mother and sister, and Rodney's nieces.
Rating: Explicit
Length: 12,417
Content Notes: no AO3-type warnings apply
Creator Links: Brighid on AO3, Brighid (aka mz_bstone) on sga_flashfic, librarychick_94 on AO3, librarychick_94 on Audiofic Archive
Themes: Marriage of Convenience, First time, Pining, AU

Summary: A marriage of convenience has some very incovenient complications for Rodney, as he deals with the fact that he's still in love with John Sheppard.

Reccer's Notes: Written for a Harlequin challenge, this has the classic structure with John persuading Rodney to marry him so as to access an inheritance and get control of his family's aeronautics company, and Rodney, who's carried a torch for John since childhood, going along despite fearing John will break his heart. It's mostly a complete AU although Rodney used to be in the Stargate programme, and John used to be in the Air Force, so I guess it could be a very divergent canon-divergent AU. The writing's fresh and amusing and of course it has the requisite happy ending. As it dates from 2005 (and is anyway an AU) several details differ from canon, like Rodney's and John's families. A fun, romantic read, and an SGA classic.

Fanwork Links: The Convenient Husband pt 1 & part 2, and an excellent podfic read by librarychick_94

Fandom: MCU
Pairings/Characters: Katy Chen/Shang-Chi
Rating: Mature
Length: 53k
Creator Links: NyxEtoile, OlivesAwl 
Theme: marriage of convenience, AU, going home, friends to lovers, everyone thinks we're dating, competence, characters of color,

Summary: As they walked out, she could feel Shaun stewing and probably pissed off beside her, but he didn’t say anything, so neither did she. Instead she pulled out her phone and googled San Francisco marriage license.

They were in the elevator before he finally spoke. “This is not something I’m willing to let you do.”

“Okay, well, getting deported back to fucking China is not something I’m willing to let you do, so where does that leave us?”

Reccer's Notes: Shaun has a problem with his immigration status. His best friend Katy offers the obvious solution: a green card marriage. This changes many things, but others stay the same. This fic explores Shaun and Katy's life together, from marriage to school to the Snap to the events of the movie, in a fun and engaging way. I love the way both characters are written, but especially Katy--she really gets a chance to shine, when she's not shoved into the Funny Best Friend role.

Fanwork Links: Sing You a Song of Devotion

Fandom: Endeavour (TV)
Pairings/Characters: Endeavour Morse/Joan Thursday
Rating: teen
Length: 57k
Creator Links: Pink_Dalek 
Theme: marriage of convenience, kidfic (has kids), AU, fork in the road, small fandoms, domestic, friends to lovers,

Summary: An AU starting from when Joan came to Morse's flat in "Harvest." What if he'd told her what he felt wasn't pity? What if she'd told him about the baby? Things could have been very different. No Series/Season 5 spoilers.

Reccer's Notes: In the show, Morse and Joan have a flirtation and chemistry and some light pining, but nothing ever comes from it because we know from the other shows (Endeavour (TV) is a prequel) that Morse never married. Instead, Joan had an affair with a married man, got pregnant, miscarried due to abuse, became a social worker, and married someone else. There are a lot of AUs where Morse and Joan get together, and this is one of my favorites. When he finds out she's pregnant, Morse asks Joan to marry him, and off they go from there. Both of them have a lot to learn about life together, and I enjoy watching them and their children grow and change.

Fanwork Links: An Unexpected Family

Fandom: Vorkosiverse (Ethan of Athos)
Pairings/Characters: Terrence Cee/Ethan Urquhart
Rating: Mature
Length: 20k
Creator Links: fresne 
Theme: marriage of convenience, worldbuilding, small fandoms, book fandoms, old fandoms, rare pairings, telepathy, pretend couple, post-canon, family,

Summary: Terrence Cee had spent most of his life feeling like a jumpship caught in the gravity well of a blackhole. Engines on full bore. Only able to keep out of the crushing center, but never able to escape. Now in his new life on Athos, he found himself unsure of how to find a new pace.

Ethan wondered if there was a way to get his love life gestating again. Not frozen like zygotes stored in a bio-freezer against some eventual future.

Reccer's Notes: Ethan of Athos is a largely stand-alone book set in the Vorkosigan universe. It tells the story of Ethan, a reproductive specialist from an isolationist planet that is entirely men (because they believe women are inherently sinful). When they need new ovarian cultures, Ethan is sent off into the larger galaxy to purchase them, and ends up having an adventure. Along the way, he meets a man named Terrence Cee, genetically created in a laboratory to be a telepath, who tried to slip telepathic genes into Athos' ovarian cultures because he believes that if telepaths are a minority, they will always be feared and exploited. Since everyone on Athos reproduces artificially, putting telepath genes in their ovarian cultures will mean that future generations will be entirely composed of telepaths. At the end of the book, Ethan agrees to use the telepath cultures, and invites Terrence to live with him and be a co-parent--a relationship which can be sexual, but isn't necessarily.

This story is a lovely exploration of what happens next. The worldbuilding is excellent, taking the hints from the book and expanding them into a fully-realized world. The characters are all well-written, and the relationships feel real, as Terrence tries to adapt to Athos, and both of them try to figure out what they want from each other and how to work towards it.

Fanwork Links: Time Enough

Frieren: Beyond Journey's End, Vol. 13 by Kanehito Yamada

Spoilers for the earlier volumes

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