Round Two Reviews - Part 20
Today's Featured Stories Include:
*
Of Science and Sensation by imaginary_iby
Category: Ficlet
Characters: Ten, Rose
Rating: Adult
Details: One-shot, set sometime during S2.
Why It Rocks:
Disclaimer: This fic was nominated by the reviewer.
First off, I have to confess that I was the nominator of this fic. It’s one that I’ve read a number of times. It’s not easy (for me at least) to write smut from the Doctor’s perspective, but this author accomplishes it in a believable and unique way - namely, by exploring the fact that he’s a scientist.
The story picks up in the middle of foreplay, in an established relationship. And as the story starts, the Doctor is a bit detached - no, that’s the wrong word. He’s not detached, he’s just using his enormous brain to multitask, to think about the science behind why the things that Rose is doing to him work so well.
He pondered briefly the miraculous wonder that was touch; how her soft lips and warm tongue and familiar squeezing hands all conspired against him in the most delightful of ways.
Eventually, though, even the Doctor succumbs to the power of feeling and emotion.
One of the most impressive things about this fic is that there is essentially no dialogue, and yet you feel a deep love and connection between the two characters. The way they touch each other, the way they look at each other, the way they make love to each other - there’s just so much affection in it. There’s a lot more going on here than sex.
I think this may be one of my favorite lines in any fic, ever - it’s so lovely:
It was always at this moment, the moment when she really looked at him and he really looked at her, that he remembered that science really was peripheral in the bedroom. It had everything to do with touching her, everything to do with looking at her, everything to do with her.
As the sex plays out, the author continues to maintain that lovely balance between hot and romantic. Also, there is an absolutely scorching description of the Doctor out of control which is unbeatable (admittedly a kink of mine).
Oh, and then the ending brings us back to the dichotomy between science and sensation, between thinking and feeling:
“Chemicals. Nerves. Action. Reaction. Pheromones. Endorphins. Hormones. Science,” he whispered to himself. “Touch. Kiss. Lick. Hug. Squeeze. Hold. Nibble. You.”
He smiled.
“You.”
*
Home Improvements by time_converges
Category: Fluff
Characters: Donna, Ten
Rating: All Ages
Details: One-shot, set sometime during S4.
Why It Rocks:
This is a sweet little slice-of-life story about the Doctor and Donna on the TARDIS. It doesn’t really matter whether you ship them together or not, because their relationship in this little fic is completely open to interpretation. What rings clear in this story is their intense affection for each other. The Doctor is adorably eccentric and Donna is indulgent of the Doctor’s eccentricities.
The home improvement that the Doctor is making in this case is an upgrade to Donna’s coffee maker. It probably goes without saying that the results are not very desirable for Donna.
The strongest thing about this story is how well the author captures the characters’ voices.
“… coffee! Just how you like it.”
“Just how I like it?”
“Yes, every time! Well, not every time, but most of the time. Well, more often than not. Well, sometimes. Well, once, so far.”
Donna put her hands in the pockets of her dressing gown. “So you ‘improved’ my coffeemaker, which always made decent coffee, into something that so far has only once produced coffee at all?”
The Doctor’s attempt to make coffee does not go well, but Donna realizes that it’s the thought that counts. I love when stories contain actions that speak louder than words about a relationship, and that’s the case here when Donna pretends not to notice the Doctor stealing some of her toast off of her plate at the breakfast table.
She rose from the table, and went over to him, leaned down and kissed him on his cheek. She whispered in his ear, “Thank you.”
Whether you view it as romantic or as a close friendship, their relationship in this story will make you melt into a puddle of happiness, which is exactly what fluff should do. “Home Improvements” is an excellent selection for this category.
*
Don’t Close Your Eyes by becky_h
Category: Jack/Doctor
Characters: Ten, Jack, Martha
Rating: Adult
Details: One-shot, post-LaTL.
Why It Rocks:
There are so many things to love about this fic. It captures how broken the Doctor, and to a lesser degree, Jack are immediately after the events on the Valiant. It manages to be dark and violent while still showing affection among the characters. And if Jack/Doctor is your thing (and it occasionally is mine), it is very sexy.
It picks up first with Jack and Martha while the Doctor is off dealing with the Master’s funeral pyre. The author captures Jack’s exhaustion and the fact that he’s dirty (in the literal sense) and sore so well that you feel it too - the desperate need to shower and to sleep. In a brief period of waking, before the Doctor even shows up on scene, Jack realizes that after a year on the Valiant, he’s been outside of time too long, and that means he really doesn’t want to be on the TARDIS either. He’s ready to return to the world.
Then the Doctor appears in Jack’s bed, smelling of fire and grieving and needy and desperate not to be alone.
Since he's had some sleep and made his decision, he's capable of being 'generous'. He can let go of the past year, and react with compassion and love, instead of anger or hurt.
He can keep his mouth shut, or at least put it to a use that's not quite as cruel as telling the Doctor just what, exactly, he thinks the Doctor is doing in his bed, still smelling of the Master's funeral pyre, after the hell he put the entire human race through --put Jack and Martha through-- just so he wouldn't be alone.
Jack slides his fingers into the Doctor's hair, presses against the base of his skull to tip his head back, and kisses him.
Jack doesn’t miss the fact that he probably isn’t the person that the Doctor wants to be with in that moment - it’s just that the Doctor is lonely and Jack is there. It hurts him, this realization. But he realizes that he needs someone too. He needs physical intimacy after the year of hell he’s just been through, just as much as the Doctor does.
Jack wonders briefly, if either one of them is sane. He decides that, unlike making sure they both wanted this, sanity is irrelevant and probably overrated. After the year they've just had, it's also damned unlikely.
I love that there is a moment of hesitation at one point, a tipping point where one or both of them are close to calling it off. And even though the Doctor has been the aggressor, Jack is the one who ensures that things move forward. The constant give and take of power is subtle and fascinating. The violence of the encounter, the fact that they give each other pleasure as well as pain, is both hot and heartbreaking.
The descriptions of the Doctor are beautiful - sexy and yet sort of alien:
The Doctor settles over him, light and fragile and brittle feeling, all sharp angles, and the temperature difference between them makes Jack gasp and tighten his hands on the Doctor's back.
and
In the soft light, the Doctor looks delicate - like some alien sculpture, composed entirely of sharp angles, shadow and scratches. It would be easy to mistake that for fragility, but it's not a mistake Jack can make.
For a story that contains fairly rough sex, it is also very sweet. Jack’s insistence that the Doctor stay and sleep, and later Martha’s concern that the Doctor is okay, regardless of what he and Jack have been getting up to, all show a deep affection among the characters in this story. I think this would be a great selection for the Jack/Doctor category.
*
Heritage by np_complete
Category: WIP
Characters: OCs, Jackie
Rating: Adult
Details: 15 chapters (last update May 2008), post-Doomsday AU.
Why It Rocks:
This is not the kind of story I usually read - a story in which neither the Doctor nor Rose (so far) appear. A story about a child conceived prior to “Doomsday,” one that the Doctor never knew about, a child born and raised in Pete’s World. I don’t remember what made me start reading this story a few months ago, but by a few chapters in, I was completely hooked. By the time I got to the last chapter that has been posted, I was rending my garments for more. I had fallen in love with John Tyler.
The POV character in this story is a fellow researcher at the Tyler Institute (like Torchwood, but less violent), a woman named Penny. She first knows John as simply a strange, quiet, bookish sort who isn’t very comfortable with people. But something about him charms her, and she begins to carefully pursue him.
In many ways, John is not what you’d necessary expect of a child of the Doctor and Rose. He seems to have a reputation as an under-achiever, at the Institute because of who his mother is but not having accomplished anything of note himself. Gradually, as you see more glimpses of John’s past, you begin to understand what his childhood was like and why he ended up this way.
The courtship of Penny and John is absolutely lovely. Sweet and hesitant at first - neither of them are aggressive people - but you can really feel their attraction for each other leap off the page. Before he allows it to progress into a true relationship, John tells Penny about his origins, about the fact that his father was a time-travelling alien. I love seeing the outsider’s perspective on the story of “Doomsday”:
“She saw my dad one more time after that, and he said it was impossible for him to cross again. He wouldn’t even be able to communicate with her again.”
It sounded sad-and, to be honest, a little bit convenient. “And you said your mum didn’t know she was pregnant at the time?”
“That’s what she says,” he said, letting go of her hand and stuffing his in his pockets. He was looking towards his feet when he said, gruffly, “He doesn’t know I exist. I have no idea what he would have done if he had.”
Once she accepts his story - perhaps doesn’t believe it, but believes that he believes it and that he isn’t mad - their relationship progresses. One of the most refreshing things about this fic is that the characters don’t fall into bed together through some contrived scenario. They make a decision to make love to each other and so they do.
How long had it been since anyone had touched him with tenderness? Too long, surely.
The other thing that’s refreshing and unique about the their first time together is that John is neither an accomplished lover nor is he inexperienced. He has just enough experience to know that he won’t get everything right the first time, so he asks and he experiments. It seems very Doctorish, actually, even though the Doctor is rarely written this way in sex scenes.
As they fall in love with each other, John reveals more and more facets of his life to Penny. Again, there seems to be so much going on under the surface for him, that so much of the way he views himself is a result of his absent father and distant mother.
“I wanted to test your boredom threshold,” he admitted.
She considered several replies, as they boarded the train, but settled on, “Why?”
“Because I’m dull,” he said, very firmly. “If you’re going to spend time with me, you’ll have to accept that. I care about things nobody else cares about.”
“You’re not dull,” she told him. It was true. “Why do you say that you are?”
They found seats, sat down. “Because - this is how I live,” he said. “No parties, no celebrities, no bright lights and photographers and names in the gossip magazines. Just hard work and a quiet life. And-maybe you want that too, I don’t know. But you need to understand. Pete Tyler, Rose Tyler - I’m just John. I’m just an ordinary man.”
Another high point in the story is meeting Jackie. The reader is in the position to be amused, because we know what Jackie is going to be like. When Penny is anticipating a judgmental dowager, we can laugh, because we know Jackie isn’t going to be anything like that. The author does an admirable job of making her sound old, but still definitely Jackie. She says of a charity function:
“They asked me to come,” said Jackie Tyler. “Always do, but I don’t go anymore. It’s so long! And you can’t get up for the ladies’ or someone’s taking a picture. Can’t even yawn, someone takes notice. I’d rather read about it next day.”
Rose is, as I said, thus far absent in this story, and I found that I had very mixed feelings about her. She clearly hasn’t done right by her son in a lot of ways, but at the same time you have to pity the situation she was in. This is not a woman who ever made it back to the Doctor. She had to raise this child in his absence, and it must have been terribly hard. She seems to have turned her loss and heartbreak into a single-minded focus on her work with the Institute and on, unfortunately, trying to turn her son into someone that he’s not.
“I suppose on the one hand, he’s an inspiring role model,” she said, “doing heroic things and saving people. But on the other . . . I imagine you’d much rather have had a real father, hadn’t you?”
“He was off in another universe, doing something much more important than having a family,” said John, rather bleakly. “And that made it okay for my mother to do the same thing.”
All in all, it’s an intriguing story. There are fifteen chapters of Heritage thus far, and I for one hope there will be more soon!
*
Ever/Was by treblebeth, onlylyin, and ljg_fanfic
Category: WIP
Characters: Rose, Ten II
Rating: All Ages
Details: A virtual season five with Rose and Ten II, housed at its own LJ. Currently six episodes/stories, latest episode posted February 2009.
Why It Rocks:
I knew right away when I started reading this fic that it was not just any post-JE Rose/Ten II story. For one thing, it starts before the events of “Turn Left,” dedicating one whole chapter to giving us glimpses of what Rose's life might have been like, hopping from one universe to another. It is a fairly dark view of her life: little sleep, obsessively pursuing her search for the right universe, not only because she wants to get back to the Doctor for herself, but because she knows she has to in order to save the universe. She sees the disaster the Master wrought during the Year that Never Was. The authors fill in some of the blanks of her experiences, such as explaining how she met the Torchwood team in that Doctor-less world where Donna turned left. We get a glimpse of her relationship with Mickey, and how her unforgiving pace led to some deterioration of their friendship.
Then in the second chapter, we get to see Rose’s perspective on the events of “Journey’s End.” One of my favourite things in this story is that the authors fill in some important blanks during the goodbyes, stretching them out so that characters can have proper conversations. Rose, the Doctor, and Jack have an opportunity to be together for a bit. And then Rose and Jack get to talk:
“I’m glad,” she said warmly. “That you’ve got them, that you’re defending the earth-” she hesitated.
“That I’m alive?” he finished, tilting his head almost ruefully.
Rose didn’t flinch, but she wanted to. Part of her wanted to be sorry because she knew what he’d been through, but having him standing here in front of her, strong and handsome and so very Jack, made an apology impossible. It would have been a lie. She wasn’t sorry she’d brought him back. “Yeah,” she said.
Once the events of JE are over, the focus of the story is on Rose and Ten II, and on the development of their relationship. The characterization of Ten II is quite well done in this story, and as in many stories, my empathy for his situation hurts my heart. He struggles with nightmares and so many terrible memories that are his and yet not. And he and Rose travel the Earth:
It was like a game; they threw themselves out into the world like a couple of dice, rolling about and coming up sixes and sevens. She’d said that once and he was so taken with the idea that he bought a gaming die, one of those twenty-siders. Now he threw it after they boarded, after they found their seats and settled down, to choose which stop they disembarked. Once he rolled a twenty and crowed, “Critical hit!” and let her decide. He never rolled a critical miss.
The author captures a nice balance of angst, sexiness, and humour in their relationship:
“What in heaven is going on in that odd little human brain of yours?”
“Let’s find a room, yeah? I think I want to shag you breathless.”
“Oh!” He sat back, bemused. “You…” His brow quirked. “You will tell me what just happened?”
“In the post-shag colloquy.”
He pushed his chair out and grabbed the rucksack. “I love the post-shag colloquy!”
They meet a Native American named Charlie, a lovely original character, and I was pleasantly surprised to see that he was going to play more than just a brief role in the narrative. He’s taken them to a powwow, and because it’s the Doctor and Rose, things are starting to develop into an adventure.
I will definitely be reading this WIP as it continues. It is well-written, and a worthy candidate for a vote in the WIP category.
*
Today's reviews were written by unfolded73.
*
Of Science and Sensation by imaginary_iby
Category: Ficlet
Characters: Ten, Rose
Rating: Adult
Details: One-shot, set sometime during S2.
Why It Rocks:
Disclaimer: This fic was nominated by the reviewer.
First off, I have to confess that I was the nominator of this fic. It’s one that I’ve read a number of times. It’s not easy (for me at least) to write smut from the Doctor’s perspective, but this author accomplishes it in a believable and unique way - namely, by exploring the fact that he’s a scientist.
The story picks up in the middle of foreplay, in an established relationship. And as the story starts, the Doctor is a bit detached - no, that’s the wrong word. He’s not detached, he’s just using his enormous brain to multitask, to think about the science behind why the things that Rose is doing to him work so well.
He pondered briefly the miraculous wonder that was touch; how her soft lips and warm tongue and familiar squeezing hands all conspired against him in the most delightful of ways.
Eventually, though, even the Doctor succumbs to the power of feeling and emotion.
One of the most impressive things about this fic is that there is essentially no dialogue, and yet you feel a deep love and connection between the two characters. The way they touch each other, the way they look at each other, the way they make love to each other - there’s just so much affection in it. There’s a lot more going on here than sex.
I think this may be one of my favorite lines in any fic, ever - it’s so lovely:
It was always at this moment, the moment when she really looked at him and he really looked at her, that he remembered that science really was peripheral in the bedroom. It had everything to do with touching her, everything to do with looking at her, everything to do with her.
As the sex plays out, the author continues to maintain that lovely balance between hot and romantic. Also, there is an absolutely scorching description of the Doctor out of control which is unbeatable (admittedly a kink of mine).
Oh, and then the ending brings us back to the dichotomy between science and sensation, between thinking and feeling:
“Chemicals. Nerves. Action. Reaction. Pheromones. Endorphins. Hormones. Science,” he whispered to himself. “Touch. Kiss. Lick. Hug. Squeeze. Hold. Nibble. You.”
He smiled.
“You.”
*
Home Improvements by time_converges
Category: Fluff
Characters: Donna, Ten
Rating: All Ages
Details: One-shot, set sometime during S4.
Why It Rocks:
This is a sweet little slice-of-life story about the Doctor and Donna on the TARDIS. It doesn’t really matter whether you ship them together or not, because their relationship in this little fic is completely open to interpretation. What rings clear in this story is their intense affection for each other. The Doctor is adorably eccentric and Donna is indulgent of the Doctor’s eccentricities.
The home improvement that the Doctor is making in this case is an upgrade to Donna’s coffee maker. It probably goes without saying that the results are not very desirable for Donna.
The strongest thing about this story is how well the author captures the characters’ voices.
“… coffee! Just how you like it.”
“Just how I like it?”
“Yes, every time! Well, not every time, but most of the time. Well, more often than not. Well, sometimes. Well, once, so far.”
Donna put her hands in the pockets of her dressing gown. “So you ‘improved’ my coffeemaker, which always made decent coffee, into something that so far has only once produced coffee at all?”
The Doctor’s attempt to make coffee does not go well, but Donna realizes that it’s the thought that counts. I love when stories contain actions that speak louder than words about a relationship, and that’s the case here when Donna pretends not to notice the Doctor stealing some of her toast off of her plate at the breakfast table.
She rose from the table, and went over to him, leaned down and kissed him on his cheek. She whispered in his ear, “Thank you.”
Whether you view it as romantic or as a close friendship, their relationship in this story will make you melt into a puddle of happiness, which is exactly what fluff should do. “Home Improvements” is an excellent selection for this category.
*
Don’t Close Your Eyes by becky_h
Category: Jack/Doctor
Characters: Ten, Jack, Martha
Rating: Adult
Details: One-shot, post-LaTL.
Why It Rocks:
There are so many things to love about this fic. It captures how broken the Doctor, and to a lesser degree, Jack are immediately after the events on the Valiant. It manages to be dark and violent while still showing affection among the characters. And if Jack/Doctor is your thing (and it occasionally is mine), it is very sexy.
It picks up first with Jack and Martha while the Doctor is off dealing with the Master’s funeral pyre. The author captures Jack’s exhaustion and the fact that he’s dirty (in the literal sense) and sore so well that you feel it too - the desperate need to shower and to sleep. In a brief period of waking, before the Doctor even shows up on scene, Jack realizes that after a year on the Valiant, he’s been outside of time too long, and that means he really doesn’t want to be on the TARDIS either. He’s ready to return to the world.
Then the Doctor appears in Jack’s bed, smelling of fire and grieving and needy and desperate not to be alone.
Since he's had some sleep and made his decision, he's capable of being 'generous'. He can let go of the past year, and react with compassion and love, instead of anger or hurt.
He can keep his mouth shut, or at least put it to a use that's not quite as cruel as telling the Doctor just what, exactly, he thinks the Doctor is doing in his bed, still smelling of the Master's funeral pyre, after the hell he put the entire human race through --put Jack and Martha through-- just so he wouldn't be alone.
Jack slides his fingers into the Doctor's hair, presses against the base of his skull to tip his head back, and kisses him.
Jack doesn’t miss the fact that he probably isn’t the person that the Doctor wants to be with in that moment - it’s just that the Doctor is lonely and Jack is there. It hurts him, this realization. But he realizes that he needs someone too. He needs physical intimacy after the year of hell he’s just been through, just as much as the Doctor does.
Jack wonders briefly, if either one of them is sane. He decides that, unlike making sure they both wanted this, sanity is irrelevant and probably overrated. After the year they've just had, it's also damned unlikely.
I love that there is a moment of hesitation at one point, a tipping point where one or both of them are close to calling it off. And even though the Doctor has been the aggressor, Jack is the one who ensures that things move forward. The constant give and take of power is subtle and fascinating. The violence of the encounter, the fact that they give each other pleasure as well as pain, is both hot and heartbreaking.
The descriptions of the Doctor are beautiful - sexy and yet sort of alien:
The Doctor settles over him, light and fragile and brittle feeling, all sharp angles, and the temperature difference between them makes Jack gasp and tighten his hands on the Doctor's back.
and
In the soft light, the Doctor looks delicate - like some alien sculpture, composed entirely of sharp angles, shadow and scratches. It would be easy to mistake that for fragility, but it's not a mistake Jack can make.
For a story that contains fairly rough sex, it is also very sweet. Jack’s insistence that the Doctor stay and sleep, and later Martha’s concern that the Doctor is okay, regardless of what he and Jack have been getting up to, all show a deep affection among the characters in this story. I think this would be a great selection for the Jack/Doctor category.
*
Heritage by np_complete
Category: WIP
Characters: OCs, Jackie
Rating: Adult
Details: 15 chapters (last update May 2008), post-Doomsday AU.
Why It Rocks:
This is not the kind of story I usually read - a story in which neither the Doctor nor Rose (so far) appear. A story about a child conceived prior to “Doomsday,” one that the Doctor never knew about, a child born and raised in Pete’s World. I don’t remember what made me start reading this story a few months ago, but by a few chapters in, I was completely hooked. By the time I got to the last chapter that has been posted, I was rending my garments for more. I had fallen in love with John Tyler.
The POV character in this story is a fellow researcher at the Tyler Institute (like Torchwood, but less violent), a woman named Penny. She first knows John as simply a strange, quiet, bookish sort who isn’t very comfortable with people. But something about him charms her, and she begins to carefully pursue him.
In many ways, John is not what you’d necessary expect of a child of the Doctor and Rose. He seems to have a reputation as an under-achiever, at the Institute because of who his mother is but not having accomplished anything of note himself. Gradually, as you see more glimpses of John’s past, you begin to understand what his childhood was like and why he ended up this way.
The courtship of Penny and John is absolutely lovely. Sweet and hesitant at first - neither of them are aggressive people - but you can really feel their attraction for each other leap off the page. Before he allows it to progress into a true relationship, John tells Penny about his origins, about the fact that his father was a time-travelling alien. I love seeing the outsider’s perspective on the story of “Doomsday”:
“She saw my dad one more time after that, and he said it was impossible for him to cross again. He wouldn’t even be able to communicate with her again.”
It sounded sad-and, to be honest, a little bit convenient. “And you said your mum didn’t know she was pregnant at the time?”
“That’s what she says,” he said, letting go of her hand and stuffing his in his pockets. He was looking towards his feet when he said, gruffly, “He doesn’t know I exist. I have no idea what he would have done if he had.”
Once she accepts his story - perhaps doesn’t believe it, but believes that he believes it and that he isn’t mad - their relationship progresses. One of the most refreshing things about this fic is that the characters don’t fall into bed together through some contrived scenario. They make a decision to make love to each other and so they do.
How long had it been since anyone had touched him with tenderness? Too long, surely.
The other thing that’s refreshing and unique about the their first time together is that John is neither an accomplished lover nor is he inexperienced. He has just enough experience to know that he won’t get everything right the first time, so he asks and he experiments. It seems very Doctorish, actually, even though the Doctor is rarely written this way in sex scenes.
As they fall in love with each other, John reveals more and more facets of his life to Penny. Again, there seems to be so much going on under the surface for him, that so much of the way he views himself is a result of his absent father and distant mother.
“I wanted to test your boredom threshold,” he admitted.
She considered several replies, as they boarded the train, but settled on, “Why?”
“Because I’m dull,” he said, very firmly. “If you’re going to spend time with me, you’ll have to accept that. I care about things nobody else cares about.”
“You’re not dull,” she told him. It was true. “Why do you say that you are?”
They found seats, sat down. “Because - this is how I live,” he said. “No parties, no celebrities, no bright lights and photographers and names in the gossip magazines. Just hard work and a quiet life. And-maybe you want that too, I don’t know. But you need to understand. Pete Tyler, Rose Tyler - I’m just John. I’m just an ordinary man.”
Another high point in the story is meeting Jackie. The reader is in the position to be amused, because we know what Jackie is going to be like. When Penny is anticipating a judgmental dowager, we can laugh, because we know Jackie isn’t going to be anything like that. The author does an admirable job of making her sound old, but still definitely Jackie. She says of a charity function:
“They asked me to come,” said Jackie Tyler. “Always do, but I don’t go anymore. It’s so long! And you can’t get up for the ladies’ or someone’s taking a picture. Can’t even yawn, someone takes notice. I’d rather read about it next day.”
Rose is, as I said, thus far absent in this story, and I found that I had very mixed feelings about her. She clearly hasn’t done right by her son in a lot of ways, but at the same time you have to pity the situation she was in. This is not a woman who ever made it back to the Doctor. She had to raise this child in his absence, and it must have been terribly hard. She seems to have turned her loss and heartbreak into a single-minded focus on her work with the Institute and on, unfortunately, trying to turn her son into someone that he’s not.
“I suppose on the one hand, he’s an inspiring role model,” she said, “doing heroic things and saving people. But on the other . . . I imagine you’d much rather have had a real father, hadn’t you?”
“He was off in another universe, doing something much more important than having a family,” said John, rather bleakly. “And that made it okay for my mother to do the same thing.”
All in all, it’s an intriguing story. There are fifteen chapters of Heritage thus far, and I for one hope there will be more soon!
*
Ever/Was by treblebeth, onlylyin, and ljg_fanfic
Category: WIP
Characters: Rose, Ten II
Rating: All Ages
Details: A virtual season five with Rose and Ten II, housed at its own LJ. Currently six episodes/stories, latest episode posted February 2009.
Why It Rocks:
I knew right away when I started reading this fic that it was not just any post-JE Rose/Ten II story. For one thing, it starts before the events of “Turn Left,” dedicating one whole chapter to giving us glimpses of what Rose's life might have been like, hopping from one universe to another. It is a fairly dark view of her life: little sleep, obsessively pursuing her search for the right universe, not only because she wants to get back to the Doctor for herself, but because she knows she has to in order to save the universe. She sees the disaster the Master wrought during the Year that Never Was. The authors fill in some of the blanks of her experiences, such as explaining how she met the Torchwood team in that Doctor-less world where Donna turned left. We get a glimpse of her relationship with Mickey, and how her unforgiving pace led to some deterioration of their friendship.
Then in the second chapter, we get to see Rose’s perspective on the events of “Journey’s End.” One of my favourite things in this story is that the authors fill in some important blanks during the goodbyes, stretching them out so that characters can have proper conversations. Rose, the Doctor, and Jack have an opportunity to be together for a bit. And then Rose and Jack get to talk:
“I’m glad,” she said warmly. “That you’ve got them, that you’re defending the earth-” she hesitated.
“That I’m alive?” he finished, tilting his head almost ruefully.
Rose didn’t flinch, but she wanted to. Part of her wanted to be sorry because she knew what he’d been through, but having him standing here in front of her, strong and handsome and so very Jack, made an apology impossible. It would have been a lie. She wasn’t sorry she’d brought him back. “Yeah,” she said.
Once the events of JE are over, the focus of the story is on Rose and Ten II, and on the development of their relationship. The characterization of Ten II is quite well done in this story, and as in many stories, my empathy for his situation hurts my heart. He struggles with nightmares and so many terrible memories that are his and yet not. And he and Rose travel the Earth:
It was like a game; they threw themselves out into the world like a couple of dice, rolling about and coming up sixes and sevens. She’d said that once and he was so taken with the idea that he bought a gaming die, one of those twenty-siders. Now he threw it after they boarded, after they found their seats and settled down, to choose which stop they disembarked. Once he rolled a twenty and crowed, “Critical hit!” and let her decide. He never rolled a critical miss.
The author captures a nice balance of angst, sexiness, and humour in their relationship:
“What in heaven is going on in that odd little human brain of yours?”
“Let’s find a room, yeah? I think I want to shag you breathless.”
“Oh!” He sat back, bemused. “You…” His brow quirked. “You will tell me what just happened?”
“In the post-shag colloquy.”
He pushed his chair out and grabbed the rucksack. “I love the post-shag colloquy!”
They meet a Native American named Charlie, a lovely original character, and I was pleasantly surprised to see that he was going to play more than just a brief role in the narrative. He’s taken them to a powwow, and because it’s the Doctor and Rose, things are starting to develop into an adventure.
I will definitely be reading this WIP as it continues. It is well-written, and a worthy candidate for a vote in the WIP category.
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Today's reviews were written by unfolded73.