Some Everwood slash:

BJ has two Bright/Colin stories all the more painful for their restraint: Moving On, surely, is too short to hurt as sharply as it does; Whilst in This Machine brings in Amy, and brotherhood, and other things. Conscious is a dark Delia future-fic: maybe too dark, but beautifully written.

Babywitch has two Ephram/Colin pieces, both focusing on how broken Colin is, how difficult his recovery is. I like Shattered better; Ghacciatto starts off beautifully, but goes on just a little too long.

Some Firefly fanfic, because I miss the show so terribly:

Jane St Clair's Taste of This is an answer to Kita's AU "Things That Never Happened" challenge: four bright brittle glimpses of strange worlds Simon might have traveled through. My favorite is the Chinese ghost story about a difficult duty a doctor might take on; though then there's the in-joke I won't ruin for you, or ... they're all good. Pieces in a kaleidescope: shake them up and see character fall into an unexpected shape.

I didn't like Edges of Things as much, but it's got great Simon and River voices, and probably made for those of you who favor that particular Special Hell.

Vehemently's Cradle Elbows Wide only whets my appetite for pre-series Mal or Zoe fic: I think it may have been Jossed by the revised opening to "Serenity," but it's still worth checking out for its absolutely dead-on narrative voice and its vision of how an army of Independents might actually work.

Northlight has been doing a lot of interesting character vignettes, teasing out potential backstories. "Still Flying" (not archived yet) looks at Zoe-Kaylee interaction, which we haven't gotten much of yet on the show; the Mal characterization doesn't quite work for me (too old West, not enough of Firefly's particular brand of realism), but it's an intriguing speculation. Faith for the Fearful is a quick, sympathetic look at Book. But Northlight's most outstanding Firefly work, it seems to me, has been her two stories on Inara, which struggle with the somewhat contradictory way the Companion has been portrayed and end up depicting her as absence, nullity, void--all very traditional ways of representing women, particularly prostitutes. I don't agree with all of the extrapolation done in Charmed Life and Opaque, but I'm glad to have read the stories anyway.

Debchan's Tetchy is so clever and funny and hot that I believe entirely in its pairing for the duration (and want more! more! more! like a baby bird crying for worms), even though it's not one that ever occurs to me when I'm watching the show.

And Hossgal's Patience doesn't make me like the old woman. It makes me live her.

I'm celebrating the new year with some humor recommendations:

• Mooncalf's summary of Every Fanfic Ever Written
• The First Evil's Livejournal (spoilers through the current episode, and possibly further in the comments)
• Naomi Kritzer's Faust's SASE