Fandom: FIREFLY
Pairing: crew, gen
Length: 4035 words
Author on LJ: lyrstzha
Why this must be read:

And sometimes Firefly fic brings the angst in spades. This is River at the end of the pilot, wrestling with collapsing possibilities. Seven ways the crew may not have come together quite as we know them - seven ways River and Simon could therefore have met with disaster instead of precarious safe harbour on Serenity. Each of the possibilities is neatly plausible for that character, and the end results are grim enough that this is a good story to read while holding firmly to the knowledge that it didn't happen this way.

( a dark and creepifying excerpt )

The Truth of Wings

Fandom: Entourage
Pairing: Vince/Eric
Author on LJ:: dancinbutterfly
Author Website: Fanfic Tag on LJ

I wanted to start off this collection of recs with a story that introduces a couple of the fundamentals of Entourage: Vince's career and Vince's relationship with Eric. This follows from the timeline we know about into the future, and ends on one of my favorite notes for an Entourage fic.

He wonders for the millionth time what took E so fucking long to come out. He's happier here. Vince is sure of it - even with that psycho bitch he's dating.

It's not the pizza thing. He doesn't give a shit what E ended up doing for cash and he thinks that in any other universe, E probably would have eventually gotten a business degree and opened some sort of small business in the old neighborhood.

But this is the universe where he can act. And in this universe, there's Southern California and E belongs in it.

And the Winner Is

Fandom: Entourage
Pairing: Vince/Eric
Author on LJ:: astolat
Author Website: Fanfic by Astolat

It's no mean feat to master the sharp-tongued humour of the Entourage cast, while still conveying the genuine affection and love that runs through the relationships of the characters. What I love about this story is that it's so damn plausible--Vince is a passive aggressive little bitch when he thinks Eric is moving too far out of his orbit, and Eric will tell the world to go screw itself if it means making Vince happy. They're so damn-the-consequences about each other, and watching the rest of their world flip out over the decisions they make is both hilarious and deeply realistic.

Also, I have a soft spot for Eric's success story. But that's just because Eric Murphy is amazing.

"I'm not fucking Rasputin!" Shauna snapped. "I can't make them ignore reality, okay, and reality is that as of Friday you are not living with your manager and your brother and the biggest fucking mooch in town, you are living with a major Hollywood producer who can afford his own six million dollar house, and oh, two other guys, who the fuck cares, and that is a story."

"Okay, just—" Eric caught Vince by the shoulder and pushed him back into the booth. "Just tell us what we're looking at here, Shauna, and then let's talk about how to deal with it."

"Yeah," Vince said, folding his arms, "like how about telling them we're not sleeping together, so it's going to be a fucking waste of their time?"

"Why, no, Vince, I did not think to try that," Shauna said. "They think I'm lying, okay? They have decided that I am lying my sweet little ass off to cover yours, the Brokeback Hollywood saga of the year awaits them in your home, and you are fucking lucky that I got a week's notice on this thing—"

Home Sweet Home

Fandom: Entourage
Pairing: Vince/Eric
Author on LJ:: fourteencandles
Author Website: Fanfic Tag on LJ

What is so impressive about "Boys Will Always Break Your Heart" is not that the author took us back to New York instead of planting us firmly in LA, though that is pretty unique. It's not that the author creates an entire neighborhood, an entire universe out of the handful of canon we have about the boys' life in Queeen, though s/he does. It's not that s/he uses the perspective of Eric's mother to tell the story of her son and her son's best friend coming out to their parents, though the grace with which that perspective is developed is pretty phenomenal. It's that, at the end of the day, you come to love Vince and Eric as the boys they really are, not as the personas they have to maintain in LA. There's no pretense, no bullshit, no runaround. They're as far away from LA as they can possibly be and remain in the same country, and the shift in location illuminates aspects of their characters that would otherwise be overlooked.

I can't recommend this story enough, because it's so perfectly in character--it's just the character that's hidden behind all the amusing Hollywood shenanigans of the show. Fourteencandles does a wonderful job of pulling it out and making it real, and it's a wonderful companion to the abusive hilarity of the show itself. Just read it. You won't regret it.

“All right. Love you, Ma,” he says.

“Eric, I love you, too,” she says. She takes a minute to untangle the cord, then hangs the phone up on the wall and smiles. She didn’t ask about the hotel, in part, because it will be nice to have him home. He has always been a sweet boy. Endlessly sweet. She thinks if he’d grown up somewhere else — the middle of the country, maybe, or upstate — maybe it would be more obvious. As it is, the sweetness was buried once he started school, and though he’s always been a good boy — knows better than to talk back to his mother, for one — she knows he comes off harder than he is. Tough. Scrappy, one of the teachers called him. She used to hear him talking with the boys on the stoop, everyone exaggerating, and it used to surprise her to hear her Eric, her earnest, sweet boy, come up with fast little lines that made her gasp while the other boys laughed. But he does all right, now, and there was no other way she could have raised him. Nothing else she could have done.

Boys Will Always Break Your Heart

Fandom: DC COMICS
Pairing: none
Author on LJ: thedeadparrot
Author Website: Nightvision
Why this must be read:

When Dick Grayson sees Wayne Manor for the first time, he thinks that it looks like it could eat him.  It's hard to say it didn't.  Written for Lady Sarai in the Yuletide 2006 Challenge.

This was written as a Batman Begins fic, but really, it could fit into just about any Batman incarnation.  thedeadparrot shows us Dick Grayson's life as he comes to Wayne Manor, his realization of his parents' murder, and how he comes to be Robin.  More than that, she gives us a picture of life in the manor with a grieving boy, a man who doesn't know how to relate to him, and one English butler.  It takes the bare facts that are so often used as mere back story and brings them to life in a lyrical way.

The Beginnings of All Things are Small