rec: The Last Enemy by Prochytes
I'm ffutures, Marcus Rowland at the archive, and I'll be reccing this week. My mix this time includes some Torchwood, old school Who, new Who, and crossovers, and a couple of authors who haven't been featured here before.
Due to work problems I may not be around to post every day, so I'm posting all of the week's recs on Sunday night, scheduled to appear at 7AM each day, and hoping nothing goes wrong. Apologies if they all appear at once, or vanish into Limbo - I'll fix any problems as quickly as I can.
Story: The Last Enemy
Author: Prochytes
Rating: Adult
Word Count: 9946
Characters: Gwen Cooper, Martha Jones, Martha Jones, Suzie Costello, The Master (Simm)
Author's Summary: Christmas Day in the Master’s Cardiff. Gwen Cooper is still Gwen Cooper. She doesn’t have much time to work out why.
Warnings: Explicit Violence, Swearing
Recced because: Gwen Cooper was one of the best characters in Torchwood, and I thought it was about time I recced a story that featured her. This one is a beauty, a Doctor Who / Torchwood crossover in which Gwen has to handle the events of The End of Time, with a little help from a very unexpected source.
[Excerpt]It didn’t work on cats. The ebony ripple that had pulsed across the road two streets (eighty-seven heartbeats) back was still a feline. Ears flat against its head; eyes staring. Kitty couldn’t know what had just pissed all over the planet.
No hive-mind. The one she had pistol-whipped outside Asda (four streets, nine hundred and sixty-three heartbeats) had looked - briefly - just as surprised to see her as... (don’t remember, mustn’t remember, hold the thought by the rim so it can’t scald) as the first one. They weren’t sharing information telepathically.
He didn’t know she was coming, and this was still her town. Alien mastermind, my arse; you could live in Cardiff for twenty years and still not have a bloody clue what to do there of a Friday night. If she got the drop on him, she could take him.
How many times, though? Three? Ten? A hundred? Cardiff wasn’t a battlefield, now. It was a video-game, and not one where she got to be the shooter. Gwen Cooper had become the obstacle; the adversary; the poorly pixelated mook. Every time she won, he could restart the level. Harold Saxon only had to win the once.
And so Gwen Cooper ran for her life through the December dark (still fast, still very fast - the first trimester hadn’t yet got around to pilfering her pace), measuring out the streets of her city in footfalls and prodigal heartbeats, twisting her options like a blackjack player, and not making it up as she went along. Captain Jack Harkness had made it up as he went along, and hadn’t that ended well for everyone? Jesus fucking Christ, Jack, you had to go and bolt to the stars like the cheap little hustler you always were. Left our town with an exhausted, pregnant basket case for a champion.
Due to work problems I may not be around to post every day, so I'm posting all of the week's recs on Sunday night, scheduled to appear at 7AM each day, and hoping nothing goes wrong. Apologies if they all appear at once, or vanish into Limbo - I'll fix any problems as quickly as I can.
Story: The Last Enemy
Author: Prochytes
Rating: Adult
Word Count: 9946
Characters: Gwen Cooper, Martha Jones, Martha Jones, Suzie Costello, The Master (Simm)
Author's Summary: Christmas Day in the Master’s Cardiff. Gwen Cooper is still Gwen Cooper. She doesn’t have much time to work out why.
Warnings: Explicit Violence, Swearing
Recced because: Gwen Cooper was one of the best characters in Torchwood, and I thought it was about time I recced a story that featured her. This one is a beauty, a Doctor Who / Torchwood crossover in which Gwen has to handle the events of The End of Time, with a little help from a very unexpected source.
[Excerpt]It didn’t work on cats. The ebony ripple that had pulsed across the road two streets (eighty-seven heartbeats) back was still a feline. Ears flat against its head; eyes staring. Kitty couldn’t know what had just pissed all over the planet.
No hive-mind. The one she had pistol-whipped outside Asda (four streets, nine hundred and sixty-three heartbeats) had looked - briefly - just as surprised to see her as... (don’t remember, mustn’t remember, hold the thought by the rim so it can’t scald) as the first one. They weren’t sharing information telepathically.
He didn’t know she was coming, and this was still her town. Alien mastermind, my arse; you could live in Cardiff for twenty years and still not have a bloody clue what to do there of a Friday night. If she got the drop on him, she could take him.
How many times, though? Three? Ten? A hundred? Cardiff wasn’t a battlefield, now. It was a video-game, and not one where she got to be the shooter. Gwen Cooper had become the obstacle; the adversary; the poorly pixelated mook. Every time she won, he could restart the level. Harold Saxon only had to win the once.
And so Gwen Cooper ran for her life through the December dark (still fast, still very fast - the first trimester hadn’t yet got around to pilfering her pace), measuring out the streets of her city in footfalls and prodigal heartbeats, twisting her options like a blackjack player, and not making it up as she went along. Captain Jack Harkness had made it up as he went along, and hadn’t that ended well for everyone? Jesus fucking Christ, Jack, you had to go and bolt to the stars like the cheap little hustler you always were. Left our town with an exhausted, pregnant basket case for a champion.