I'm high on painkillers for my headache and on too much addictive slash. Thanks to Amy (:::waves:::), I'm totally immersed in Marquesate & Vashtan's "Special Forces" cycle.

I'll so regret this when I'll have to get up in two hours for work. But right now? I'm fucking flying.

Edited at 21:38:

Book One: Soldiers is a glorious, angsty, fucked-up love story, going from rape to a promise of eternity, and ends on the cliffhanger to end all cliffhangers.

Book Two: Mercenaries, however, is a cruel let-down for the normal slasher with his/her rose-colored glasses and dreams of faithfulness. The first few chapters are pure angst and drama, but after the making-up, the whole story descends into a gay free-for-all orgy with numerous threesomes and an open relationship in which, apparently, everything goes. Yuck. Any fannish reader might want to imagine their own kind of happy ending to Book One, and stop reading - that's my recommendation, anyway.

How utterly, utterly disappointing.

Perhaps the fact that the selfsame authors have written in the The Gladiator Hero (Held der Gladiatoren) 'fandom' should have clued me in earlier that our tastes most likely wouldn't match. Yikes.

The Dead Zone episode 4x07 'Grains of Sand': "You and your boyfriend..." (meaning John and Walt)

:::dies:::

Have I already announced to all and sundry that I not only adore Walt's motorcycle leather jacket, but also Speranza's "The big Picture"? Because I so do.

Vulnerable!Bush. Unsure, but determined!Hornblower. I really thought there weren't any good HH/WB stories out there apart from the ones by khaleesian. But hey, there's 'Water under the Bridge' by Juxian Tang!

(And I still need some good Hobbes/Pinocchio stories now, damn. mareen, I blame you for my Harsh Realm marathon session Saturday evening. D.B. Sweeney, like Angus MacFayden, just hits all my buttons. Ahem.)

P.S.: Sleep, optional? :::sigh:::

I'm currently contemplating the similarities between the Duncan/Methos pairing in Highlander and Sirius/Severus in Harry Potter.

Straightforward, sometimes a bit single-minded honorable hero figure loves and argues with a cunning, sarcastic, misanthropic loner with certain horrible sins in his past - isn't it obvious?

Nonetheless, in Highlander DM/M is the pairing (almost nobody ever slashed Methos with MacLeod's 'son' Richie), while in Harry Potter HP/SS is at least one if not even the main pairing with SB/SS being rare enough to be considered an unimportant subcategory.

I don't get it.

Apart from the above, I'm in a happy daze right now after having read Sam Vimes' 'Stealing Harry' and Helene's 'Beyond the Veil'. I didn't think I'd ever return to HP again -- by now being healthly sick of the fandom and most of its characters --, and even less so to SS/RL, but, well... this trip down memory lane was definitely no hardship at all. Love, love those two stories.

No, I don't want to stop smiling before I go to bed, thank you very much.