Fic-rec: TOS
As I occasionally rec this fic via my various chats, I figured it may as well be time to rec it here too.
The Oncoming Storm, by d8rkmessngr
It's wonderful. Seriously wonderful. It's dark and creepy and AU but all at the same time it's not completely AU; the timestream manages to snap back in on itself.
Only it doesn't.
Time is actually a great big ball, made out of endless rubber-bands, and it's larger than the universe, and those rubber-bands sometimes sort-of melt into other rubber-bands, and bad things happen when one of them snaps. It's all sort of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey, really.
Thing is, one of those rubber bands is actually a person: Captain Jack Harkness. He's a rubber band all to himself, and he's right at the core of the rubber-band ball. All sorts of other rubber-bands have melted into him. Or they're going to. Or they exist with the potentia that they might. Or might not.
He's a fixed point, a universal constant. The thing about universal constants is that they're often tested, tried, and sometimes even...
Broken.
Warnings and stuff: Janto and other various slashiness. It's dark. It's creepy. There's a bit of non-con (which almost put me off entirely, but there is ACTUAL PLOT that drove me ahead). There's violence, blood, gore, etc. There's random smut. You will laugh, you will shudder, you will want to kill a Time Lord (and not be sure which one you want to kill), and you may love Ianto or you may hate him, but you will accept him. There's oldschool!Whovian stuff when there needs to be (but it's explained, so don't worry), there's New!Who when there has to be. The Doctor is completely spot on, but I think I adore her Owen. Gwen's just about dead to-rights. Toshiko is a complete character - she always seems half-present in the series-proper. Martha is perfect. And the TARDIS has more than a few shining moments herself.
So far, it's 38 chapters. 7 sidestories (other warnings: some of the sidestories may contain MPREG. If you don't like that, you may safely ignore them and continue with the rest of the tale). It just keeps going.
If you're going to sit-down and read this, I don't care how fast a reader you are, you will need to devote at least a day. Probably two. Three, if you're going to read the comments (I read the comments). 38 chapters is misleading; some of those chapters have acts (because they got too long to fit one chapter into one post, she started splitting them up), and those acts may be split-up into parts (this happened later, for the exact same reason as there are acts). I think the actual count is closer to fifty, maybe sixty posts. So yeah, it's long. And worth it. And regularly-updated, amazingly enough.
Since I'm here: She wrote me something smutty. The lady rocks.
The Oncoming Storm, by d8rkmessngr
It's wonderful. Seriously wonderful. It's dark and creepy and AU but all at the same time it's not completely AU; the timestream manages to snap back in on itself.
Only it doesn't.
Time is actually a great big ball, made out of endless rubber-bands, and it's larger than the universe, and those rubber-bands sometimes sort-of melt into other rubber-bands, and bad things happen when one of them snaps. It's all sort of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey, really.
Thing is, one of those rubber bands is actually a person: Captain Jack Harkness. He's a rubber band all to himself, and he's right at the core of the rubber-band ball. All sorts of other rubber-bands have melted into him. Or they're going to. Or they exist with the potentia that they might. Or might not.
He's a fixed point, a universal constant. The thing about universal constants is that they're often tested, tried, and sometimes even...
Broken.
Warnings and stuff: Janto and other various slashiness. It's dark. It's creepy. There's a bit of non-con (which almost put me off entirely, but there is ACTUAL PLOT that drove me ahead). There's violence, blood, gore, etc. There's random smut. You will laugh, you will shudder, you will want to kill a Time Lord (and not be sure which one you want to kill), and you may love Ianto or you may hate him, but you will accept him. There's oldschool!Whovian stuff when there needs to be (but it's explained, so don't worry), there's New!Who when there has to be. The Doctor is completely spot on, but I think I adore her Owen. Gwen's just about dead to-rights. Toshiko is a complete character - she always seems half-present in the series-proper. Martha is perfect. And the TARDIS has more than a few shining moments herself.
So far, it's 38 chapters. 7 sidestories (other warnings: some of the sidestories may contain MPREG. If you don't like that, you may safely ignore them and continue with the rest of the tale). It just keeps going.
If you're going to sit-down and read this, I don't care how fast a reader you are, you will need to devote at least a day. Probably two. Three, if you're going to read the comments (I read the comments). 38 chapters is misleading; some of those chapters have acts (because they got too long to fit one chapter into one post, she started splitting them up), and those acts may be split-up into parts (this happened later, for the exact same reason as there are acts). I think the actual count is closer to fifty, maybe sixty posts. So yeah, it's long. And worth it. And regularly-updated, amazingly enough.
Since I'm here: She wrote me something smutty. The lady rocks.