"I’m trying to like you, Tony. You’re just making it very hard."

This is what you get for being the only son of forgotten Bavarian royalty, the last vestige of an ancient, magical line, left to rot amongst some pretty skirts and terrible attempts at intelligent conversation.

They say Man was made in God's image, and that's not wrong, exactly, except for how it's all wrong, except for how it's always been wrong, because Man was made in God's image, that first time, but man, lowercase, widespread, always evolving into something worse, man was made in the image of man, who was made in the image of Man, who spent too much time gorging himself on apples to remember much about whose image it was he was made in.

“I promised your sister I would look after you, and that’s what I’m doing. Don’t forget, Charles, that you made this bed for yourself. Don’t blame me if you have to lie in it, too.”

Athos lies, and drinks, and remembers.

Charles, a miner from a poor village in the countryside, saves the life of Erik Lehnsherr, scion of a successful business family and the richest man on Eisen. Charles is a telepath and somewhat anxious about it, while Erik abstains from relationships because the lights flicker and doors open and electronics vibrate when he gets too excited.

Also features a long-suffering sister, a foul-mouthed bodyguard, and a best friend with a heart that is definitely not gold.

In which there are princes, spaceships, long journeys, and old secrets uncovered. (An AU sci-fi fairytale)

“Raven,” Siri whispers, and the moonlight streams silver onto his scales. He’s a chameleon, a rabbit, a fluttering bird, landing on her shoulder and digging with tiny claws. “Raven, someone’s coming.”

Or, X-Men: First Class with daemons.

Set one year post movie, Charles overloads himself in Cerebro, and his mind goes walkabout; wherever he is (and he’s around), it’s not in his body. Erik temporarily takes over the school in his absence, and finds that there’s little time for resentment or hatred when he’s busy organizing assigned reading for English lit, keeping the youngest children out of trouble, and trying to talk Raven into wearing clothing for the boys’ sake. Somewhere in between taking responsibility for the students and dreaming Charles’ dreams every night, he manages to remember that he’s something rather more than a weapon. In other words: A Love Story between two Gentlemen, told in Prose, Epistles, and Nonsense Rhymes.

Charles smiles at the pawn in his right hand. "That was when I understood how easy it was. If I operated without limits, I could remake the world. Isn't that the best argument for restraint?"

Looking back, that should have been his first clue.

He's used to the fluidity of dreams, to the quicksilver mutability of Eames within them, but it still shifts something inside his chest, to be chasing one person and finding another, to know that they are both the same. It's a Penrose staircase he's walked a thousand times, and yet every time there is a moment when he falls headlong off the paradox's edge.

Friendship means going in first and taking the heaviest fire.

Arthur's well aware that some people call this codependency. He thinks that label was invented by people who set artificial barriers on love. Love isn't a choice, it's not something you do. Love is a state of being that consumes everything in its wake like paper on fire.

You either love someone or you don't, and if you love them, you only say no until it's obvious you're not going to get your way, then you fully commit to whatever bullshit thing the person is into (whether that be yoga, distance running, video editing, or arms smuggling).

Which is how Arthur ends up with a pet pig.

When Alex Summers broke out of supermax to rescue his stupid kid brother, he had no idea it was going to be so fucking complicated.

Neal marks time in tallies because the alternatives are terrible.

XMFC/Inception fusion AU. Erik is an extractor, Alex is his point man. They're assembling a team to go after the most dangerous mind in dreamsharing: Sebastian Shaw. But unless Alex and the team can keep him in check, Erik's desire for vengeance might just rip the whole job apart around them -- and then there's the shade that haunts his dreams...

Harvey's take on the events of Pizza And A Movie, including more sex than can be measured without algebraic calculations, accidental flirting with Tom Keller, the Trauma Drama of the Grapefruit Knife, the reformation of Kyle, and the importance of having a home.

In an alternate universe, Harvey's still a lawyer but Mike's not a pot runner -- he's a deliveryman for Rollo's Pizza and Ribs, which happens to be Harvey's favorite pizza place. Once Harvey finds out his pizza guy is a genius, Mike's life takes a few turns he would not have expected.

The most powerful telepath on the planet could never be a pacifist.

Mike swallows and stares unblinkingly back at Harvey when he says, “Like it or not, Mike, you made me the man I am today.” Time Traveler’s Wife AU.

Mycroft has tea with his mother twice a month. John and Sherlock become flatmates.

Drug testing at Pearson Hardman does not have its desired preventative effect. (Sex, drugs, and a little bit of Soul.)

John is Arthur's older brother. They don't see each other very often, but they get along well enough. And they're always going to be brothers.

He opens his eyes, and he is Erik Lehnsherr. He is hardly more than a boy. And he is walking through the mud on his way to the gates of Auschwitz.

For Zach's 34th birthday, J.J. Abrams give him the reigns of the Star Trek reboot franchise and tells Zach to give him a script, a cast, and a shooting schedule by the end of the summer. Not to be left out, Chris helps out by turning the original screenwriters' swamp of notes into a shooting script and John takes over casting duties. Despite three months of whining, cereal, sighing, whining, and cross-country banter, they might just manage to get this movie together and make something new of their careers.

There's no "I" in "Avenger."

Charles looks right at him. Blinks, weakly, in the growing sunlight. "You want to go," he says. "I won't stop you, Erik."

Erik shakes his head. "I'm going to stay," he says.

"For me?" Charles' tone makes it clear he believes himself to be an inadequate reason.

Erik fixes him with a stare. "For you," he confirms.

It might be reluctantly, it might be angrily, it might even be to his death and despair, but Eliot would ultimately always go where he pointed, and Nate never understood it, not until now.

Merlin is not the only one for whom words have power.

It hadn't been Nimueh's destiny to die at his hand, on this isle. And if her destiny could be broken… so could anyone's.

Another uninnocent, elegant fall into the unmagnificent lives of adults.

To Nicolas Flamel, living is little more than a bad habit. He has been trying to break it for several years now, with little success.

It’s almost time to move on again, he thinks, looking out the window.

"How about this: you're ten kinds of a mess, chasing every set of legs in skirts or pants all over campus, you probably have twelve different diseases that haven't been diagnosed yet and I don't even need to count the ones that have, and you're a self-absorbed, emotionally stunted asshole who falls in and out of bed with someone new on a daily basis, if not hourly."

The five times Spock wasn't in love, and the one time he couldn't deny it anymore.

She thinks that maybe in another universe, one where ships don't come out of lightning storms in space, she would have had a brown-eyed, steadier child with a penchant for mischief, who would have been still clever but whom she could have sent off to Starfleet Academy knowing he would do both her and his father proud.

He has spent ten long years attempting to reconstruct what was nearly destroyed, and now he is lucky if he can last from breakfast to lunch without nodding off. Spock will die before his father and that both comforts and terrifies him in ways he does not care to closely examine.

When you're five, you're running down the street with your father, and skin your knees on the sidewalk. Your father surveys the damage and you're trying not to cry, because whenever your father sees other children bawling over something like that he first tells you how useless crying is, how it doesn't make the pain go away and doesn't make the scrape heal, before going over and offering a bandage with a kind smile.

James T. Kirk doesn't get passionate about something unless it has breasts. Leonard McCoy knows this. And then something changes.

No matter how fast he runs, he can't run away from himself.

When Spock applies to leave Vulcan for Starfleet, he is twenty-eight, which makes him a well-grown adult in human terms, but still a teenager by Vulcan standards.

You get two alpha types together, and there are going to be fireworks. There always have been, even back when they hated each other. Jim likes fireworks, and these are better than most.

He is four years old. His father is dead, his father’s people glad to be rid of the traitor. He has only his mother and his mind, and both seem liable to break.

McCoy knew that he had issues, he didn’t have to mull them over every other second to make sure they were still there.

One day, Bones brings a dongly machine thing into Jim's room and sets it up on Jim's table and then looks Jim in the eye and says, "Jim, quid pro quo."

"There's never any glory in dying," says the girl, and she sounds surprisingly sober. "People get that wrong. Glory's more my jurisdiction." She shrugs, and snuggles up next to him with her back to the boulder and her arm looped through his. "Well – and my brother's. Mostly his."

St. Mary's is just like Chris's last parish.

He wants to touch Chris's teeth, because they're picket-fence-straight and Zach isn't ever going to have one of those.

Winona has all kinds of dreams for Jim's future when he's a boy, but not Starfleet. It's already taken too much from them, she tells herself, and as much as she loves it -- as much as she wouldn't give up space for anything -- she's not about to give it her boy, too. That's not really why, after a while, though. It's that Jim seems so angry, so ready to fight anyone who gets in his way. She thinks he doesn't need more weapons, more reasons to fight; he needs a home.

"T'Pring. I know that the bond makes you desire further closeness, but do not confuse loss of self with being close. You are T'Pring, he is Spock, and the two are joined, but not the same."

When he was a kid, all Hikaru ever wanted was to fly.

When he says she got the planet in the divorce, he means it.

Sarek does not always understand his son, but that does not mean he does not love him.

Frank Hallie never meant to be the wicked stepmother in the story.

To be voiceless was terrifying, but to use silence as a weapon was somehow worse.

It's been a fair few years now and Merlin's powers don't seem to be good for much but whoring any more. He sees Arthur around (follows him around), mostly on sports teams (he started off three-day eventing, polo, fencing, but now it's football, rugby, cricket), once or twice a politician, an actor once as well. He's been a lot of things; sportsman, mayor, cult-leader, general ... people will follow Arthur anywhere. Merlin does, for a start. He knows he probably shouldn't.

"I’m going to be an astronaut." She says it so confidently that Donna would be jealous, if it weren’t so ridiculous to be jealous of a ten-year-old.

A six-year-old princess of the blood, Azula was quite accustomed to gifts; the fact that these ones talked back was just an added novelty.

Arthur's nineteen when he makes his first kill.

John Watson is a man who is comfortable with paradoxes.

He begs for it, at the end of his long life, begs for the mark of the one truth that still eludes him, the one idea that still gives him any hope.

("Remember that dinner when we—?" "I wish I didn’t.")

After Nero, Uhura goes home. Spock and Gaila do, too.

"Who designed this?" Ariadne asks no one in particular, twisting the paper around and tapping her pencil against it. She crosses out the parking lot that snakes between two of the buildings, circling poorly devised staircases. "Too much open space. Why didn't they just draw the projections a map?"

He laughs under his breath, rubbing at the light five o'clock shadow along the line of his jaw. "I designed it."

He has two thousand years to wait and he's getting married tomorrow.

Over the course of twenty years, Draco must find room to carry the things he loves best.

Uhura makes Gaila take a really boring literature class, and then Gaila tells her about the secret language of the slaves.

Amanda Grayson raises two boys on Vulcan.

The first time Alec read a slash fic—Kirk/Spock, and it was one of the first fics he’d ever read, and he’d only scrolled down because he was curious and didn’t get the terminology yet, and daaaamn that was graphic—he backed out of the post fast.

She’s not the mentally ill one here, really, and she still can’t eat custard, ten years later.

"I'm studying xenolinguistics and she's studying computer science," Uhura snaps, the eighth time some cadet leans in close across a table in the library to ask what it was like, being an Orion slave girl. "The comparative anthropology section is over there."

In which the origins of one Bela Talbot are explored.

From what Harry could make out, she had been married seven times, each of her husbands dying mysteriously and leaving her mounds of gold.

Growing up, Malcolm Reynolds never had much use for the stars.

She couldn't have been giving them to him for no reason.

"Eames is in Mombasa."

Arthur knows that those four words are nothing more to Cobb than a location.

There are other thieves, but Eames is a forger. He does not debate the legality of his actions or the rewards for his head, but he wants to make that distinction very clear. Thieves take things, steal things, plunder, and violate—and they didn’t call you the morning after. Eames might have taken things, stolen things, plundered, and violated, but he always gave a little something in return.

Eric likes to tell himself that the night he died he wasn't scared.

Following the death of his father, energy tycoon Maurice Fischer, in 2010, Fischer dismantled his inherited empire and entered the veterinary medicine program at Cornell University. When asked why, Fischer responded, "I felt I needed to make a drastic change in my life. My father's death was a wake-up call for me in many ways, and this has always been my dream. I finally decided to follow it." The Fischer Animal Clinic will offer free and reduced-cost veterinary services for low-income residents of the Los Angeles area.

"I swear to you from this moment on, I am your friend."

Neal is so very tired of saying no.

Eames was not prone to romantic notions, despite (because) of his romantic affectations; Arthur gave the impression that a grand romantic concept had never crossed his mind. And so Eames dedicated himself to feeding Arthur a steady, infuriating diet of what he seemed to want least, knowing that Arthur would inevitably be drawn to it.