Round Three Reviews - Part 15
Today's Featured Stories Include
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Thirteen by Aibhinn Link goes to Teaspoon
Categories: Dark, Ficlet, 10.5
Fandom: New Who
Characters: The Doctor, Rose
Rating: Teen
Details: Post-JE, yes, but AU in the sense that it's a future Doctor who is talking to Rose.
Why It Rocks:
Hope is a powerful thing.
There's a whole bunch of fics out there where Rose has been Bad Wolf'ed into immortality - and still shuffled off to Pete's World, to live the slow life with TenII. What sets this one apart, however, is that in most of them, Rose has accepted her immortality, and uses it as sort of incentive to go looking for the Doctor.
Aibhinn, however, realizes that acceptance isn't so easily won. You have to think that Rose would have been a bundle of emotions after the events of JE anyway. Hope, fear, sorrow, joy, disillusionment, anticipation, excitement, loss, grief. But through it all - hope, because she'd been told that she could live out her life with her Doctor. Grow old with him.
Imagine what she might have thought on learning she'd been lied to yet again. She won't grow old with her Doctor - because she won't grow old. Of all the emotions to feel - the loss of hope must surely be the worst.
As is the desire to tell the Doctor exactly what she's feeling. When she meets the Doctor - a new Doctor, by the way - at her Doctor's gravesite, Rose finally gets her chance:
"You bastard," [Rose] hissed. "You left us here with nothing, just a bit of TARDIS coral and away you go without so much as a goodbye. Live a fantastic life, you said. Well, we did, Doctor-until we suddenly realised that my husband looked twenty years older than I did. Then thirty. Then forty. At the end, people thought he was my grandfather. And he had to watch me staying young as he aged, knowing exactly what it was doing to me because he'd been you; he'd spent nine hundred years watching the people he loved wither and die. He had to live the last years of his life knowing that I would be left alone forever, young forever, and there was nothing he could do about it. And you never even told us it would happen."
The loss of hope is a horrible thing, really. In a way, it's worse than never having had hope at all. Rose, who began the events of JE with such hope - hope she'd find the Doctor, hope she'd stay with him - still ended the events with hope. Now we see her with the hope stripped away - this is Rose, bare bones. It's as if that one massive speech to the Doctor - unleashing all of the pain she surely must have felt in the intervening years - has left her a shell of what she formerly was.
"So what now?" Rose asked at last, in a voice that spoke of utter exhaustion, both physical and emotional. She had her hands in her pockets and her shoulders slumped forward, as though she were physically protecting her heart from being broken again.
But to say that the ficlet is entirely without hope would be inaccurate - because there is hope here. It just isn't with Rose. Think about it - why would the Doctor come back, fifty years on, if he hadn't expected to see Rose walking toward him, just as young as the day he'd left her behind? And important to realize - this isn't Ten. This is Thirteen who has returned for Rose. There's been years - lifetimes, really - between the time he left her on a beach in Norway, and finds her standing in an English cemetery. Years, and still he remembers, and returns.
Says the Doctor: "I don't expect anything, Rose, but I hope."
Hope is a powerful thing. One could make the argument that hope is a message strewn throughout Doctor Who. It's certainly strewn through this ficlet. Because now, at long last, the hope that Rose had once, living out her life with the Doctor - it's coming true. It's possible now for them to grow old together. The lies are becoming truth.
In short, vote for Thirteen. There are few stories where we get to watch Rose rip into the Doctor - fewer still where we cheer her on. And it's not often we see hope built, hope destroyed, hope slowly filled up again. And it's my hope that you'll agree that this fic entirely deserves your vote.
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Five Ways the Bane Didn't Return for Luke Smith and One Way They Did by Amilyn Link goes to fanfiction.net
Category: Dark/Angst
Fandom: SJA
Characters: Luke Smith-centric, with appearances by Clyde Langer, Maria Jackson, Sarah Jane Smith, and the Bane
Rating: K
Details: 1,296 words. No spoilers past the First Season.
Why It Rocks:
I love the "five things" genre of fan fiction. The trope started with basingstoke's story Five Things That Aren't True, grew into a challenge, and eventually expanded into one of the most popular fanfic paradigms. One of the other stories I reviewed this round-- Five children that weren't...and one that was--also follows this format.
As for *this* particular "five things" story, I admire how it captures Luke's detached, outsider point-of-view of his relationships and surroundings. For example, one sentence can capture his friendship with Clyde and his confusion over the pursuits of teenaged boys (No, not *those*. It's a children's show, after all, and this fic is rated K):
Clyde quickly dismisses it as "too much time in front of the computer" before dragging him out for a pizza and another attempt to teach him some form of competitive act of physical exertion.
I also adore that Luke celebrates his "Made-day," since he, technically, never had a "birth."
The ways in which the Bane could have returned for Luke are delightful, such as "papaya-flavoured crisps," which-Ew. Just, ew. No wonder Sarah Jane suspects some sort of alien mind-control has to be involved. Who in their right minds would *eat* that?
[Sarah Jane] drops a clue to Torchwood Three (about whom she knows perfectly well, thank you very much), only to find them as enamoured of papaya crisps as the rest of the country.
Oh. Well, that drops the "in their right minds" requirement.
Way Number Five has to be the funniest, though, as Clyde (once again) attempts to teach the very literal Luke about things a teenaged boy should know; in this case, card games:
"Why would [the Bane return]?"
"Uh...revenge? General evil? Hey, keep your cards up."
"We don't even know if there are more of them. How many points are the king cards?"
Clyde rolls his eyes. "Don't tell me your cards either." He sorts his hand. "You mean to tell me they made that genius brain of yours and you didn't get any information about them?"
Nothing, however, tops the awesomeness of Luke outwitting the Bane in the final part, where they canonically could have returned for Luke. I can't say more, because I don't want to give it away!
This story definitely deserves your vote. Nevertheless, I am slightly confused why this was nominated in the Dark/Angst category. I was giggling throughout the five ways the Bane didn't return and cheering for the conclusion of the one way they did.
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Underneath the Moonlight by mad_jaks/itsarift_thing
Category: Ninth Doctor, Romance
Fandom: New Who
Characters: Ninth Doctor, Jack Harkness, Rose Tyler
Rating: PG13
Details: Ficlet, complete, 390 words, OT3 Nine/Rose/Jack
Why It Rocks:
Dancing is a common metaphor in Doctor Who fanfic, and particularly in OT3 fic. Of course, it’s because dancing was used so effectively - and delightfully - as a metaphor in the Ninth Doctor episode The Doctor Dances. I like to think that it’s also so popular in fanfic because dancing is also a metaphor for happiness. For celebration. Let’s face it: the Ninth Doctor had a short and angst-filled life. He was the sole survivor of a war that left him traumatised, and everywhere he turned there were reminders of it. That’s what makes that everybody lives moment so very special.
And so it is in mad_jaks’ story Underneath the Moonlight. The Doctor, Rose and Jack are dancing at an open-air party thrown in their honour by their hosts - we’re not told who these hosts are, other than that they live on an island and they’re shorter than humans. Who they are isn’t important to this story; they’re just scene-setting. Rose is dancing with a local boy, who whirls her around and then dances away to partner another boy, and her gaze falls on the Doctor and Jack, dancing together, vivid in the moonlight that seems to cast them in the spotlight.
The Doctor without his jacket - as naked as he ever gets in public - his sweat damp tee-shirt clinging to his skin; his long, bare feet moving to a subtly different rhythm than the soft hypnotic beat of the village drums - and after the last few days that's hardly surprising, he must be exhausted - but somehow perfectly in synch with Jack.
Oh, did I mention that this little ficlet is also gorgeously sensual, in addition to being happy?
Rose, alone for just a few seconds, gets an opportunity to observe and admire her men. Probably not a rare opportunity, by the sound of things - and an opportunity she clearly appreciates, as do we.
I love the deft character touches revealed along with the eroticism of touch here:
Jack, who tips back his head when the Doctor's fingers bury themselves in his hair - revealing a long expanse of neck, that the Doctor presses his lips against.
In much OT3 fic, Jack’s shown as the aggressor, the persuader, while the Doctor is resistant, reluctant, needing to be seduced. Here, Jack’s willingly submitting, inviting the Doctor’s kiss. And perhaps something more; as Rose muses, Jack:
...can do this for the Doctor - touch him and hold him and help him forget.
Because, even in the midst of celebration, Rose can’t forget - and neither can the readers - that this is the survivor of the Time War, the last of his kind, who needs his companions to help him feel less alone.
So, while on the surface this lovely little ficlet could be read as complete fluff, there are deeper character insights if you’re on the lookout for them. And that’s what sets it apart from pure fluff, and that’s why I really like this story. Though also because this is how I love to imagine my favourite threesome: dancing away under the stars, completely carefree and with all the time in the universe to spend together: happy.
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Lacunae by kenazfiction
Category: Captain Jack Harkness
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Jack, Ianto
Rating: Teen
Details: Jack recovers slowly from what Gray did to him in “Exit Wounds.” 4700 words.
Why it Rocks:
One of the things that has bothered me about the Jack we saw at the end of the Torchwood Series 2 finale (and what we saw of him later on Doctor Who Series 4) was how relatively unaffected he seemed by having been buried under Cardiff for several centuries. Even for the immortal Jack, that many years, that many deaths should have taken a huge toll on his psyche. This story corrects that oversight. It doesn’t make Jack into a raving lunatic - far from it, but it does give a moving and realistic portrayal of a man trying to remember a life that, for him, was two millennia ago.
By now, most of the gaps had closed; the voids where muscle memory didn't quite align with cognition had narrowed to the point where he could convincingly fake his way through a day.
Jack can do all the mundane things he needs to do, although some of them a little slower than he used to. He can load a gun, he can drive a car (although the sequence of driving didn’t come to him immediately). But he’s forgotten huge chunks of his past. We learn through Jack’s internal monologue that he only thought of Gray and of his own mother during the years underground.
The author doesn’t shy away from the horrific torture that Jack must have experienced.
In the liminal space between living and dying there had been room only for pain and panic and time only to think of Gray. He had paid his penance in the currency of gravel in his lungs, in trees that forced their roots through his ribs, in the slow depredation of insects.
Jack has forgotten most of the people and events of his long life. Those memories are gradually coming back, snatches here and there that he must try to fit into the puzzle of his past. He doesn’t overlook the irony of the fact that he’s recently recalled the fact that the Time Agency wiped two years of his memory.
Jack is very closed off at the beginning of this story, and part of the reason is that he doesn’t want to admit to Gwen and Ianto that he had forgotten them, that he still doesn’t remember a lot about his relationship with them. Ianto tries to get him to open up, to connect, but Jack holds him at arm’s length.
Even a liberal application of Captain Jack's patented charm and finesse couldn't turn 'when I finally climbed out of cold storage, I had no idea who you were' into an icebreaker.
The author also addresses why Jack has maintained his Spartan living space under the Hub. Initially it was because he saw his time at Torchwood as temporary; he was only there until he could find the Doctor. Then he kept it our of habit, and now, he keeps it as a sort of penance.
Ianto ultimately doesn’t accept Jack’s rejection. He gently pushes, kissing Jack and urging him to come back to them, to him. I adore that even in the midst of this fairly angsty story, the author maintains Ianto’s wry sense of humour.
He closed his eyes, letting his hands rest on Ianto's thighs and refusing to contemplate the engaging shift of muscle and flesh. "Ianto, I am... damaged."
"Yes," Ianto agreed with a sigh, climbing off his lap and settling on the couch beside him. "Clearly. Profoundly, even." He wove their fingers together. "Look, Jack... when I was six or seven, my father took me to the Electro to see Old Yeller. Do you know that one?" Jack shook his head. "It's about a boy who has to put down his dog after it catches rabies. I cried for days after." He leaned in very earnestly. "Anyway, if you think it would help, I will take you out back and shoot you."
Finally, Jack accepts Ianto’s offer of intimacy, and in so doing, a lot of his memories flood back. As he kisses Ianto, he remembers the first girl he kissed, the first boy he slept with, name after name after name flood his mind. He is a long way from completely healed, but as the story ends, the reader is left with hopefulness.
This story is beautifully written, with breath-taking descriptions and metaphors. Both Jack and Ianto are in-character, and their relationship is handled deftly. I think you’ll be hard-pressed to find a better nominee for the Captain Jack Harkness category.
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Ground Rules by JJPOR Link goes to Teaspoon
Category: Genfic, Ficlet
Fandom: Classic Who
Characters: Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, Sergeant Benton, UNIT, Other Characters
Rating: All Ages
Details: Drama, General, Missing Scene
Why It Rocks:
It answers a question that New Who hasn't yet seen fit to answer: what's UNIT's attitude to Torchwood, particularly with regard to the Doctor?
A bit of background for those of you who've not caught up with Classic Who or UNIT. UNIT's roots lie in two extraterrestrial incursions. The first was related in the Seventh Doctor serial Remembrance of the Daleks when two factions of Daleks fought a battle in London for control of the Time Lord artefact known as 'the Hand of Omega' in late 1963. The two groups were defeated by a detachment of soldiers from the 'Intrusion Counter-Measures Group' (ICMG), which was commanded by Group Captain 'Chunky' Gilmore; he was assisted by the Doctor and a Scientific Advisor named Dr. Rachel Jensen. The ICMG was a special anti-terrorist group which drew its forces from the regular Army and the RAF. The Dalek incident was, of course, covered-up and the ICMG was disbanded shortly afterwards. However, several of its training materials and procedures were adopted by UNIT and Gilmore later served as an adviser, often lecturing to UNIT personnel.
The second incursion (as seen in the Second Doctor serial The Web of Fear), was an attempt to take over London by a disembodied entity known as the Great Intelligence, using robotic Yetis and a deadly cobweb-like fungus. In this instance another small group of British infantrymen, this time led by Colonel Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart of the Scots Guards (and assisted by the Doctor) stopped the attempted conquest in the tunnels of the London Underground.
Following the second incident, the United Nations became aware that the world faced threats from extraterrestrial sources, and that because the space programme was sending probes deeper and deeper into space, mankind was drawing attention to itself. Consequently, the UN established UNIT, giving it a mandate to investigate, monitor and combat such threats. Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart was promoted to the rank of Brigadier and put in charge of the British contingent of UNIT, which was under the purview of the British government's Department C19.
Talking to Gwen Cooper, after Martha Jones arrives at Torchwood Three to assist them, Jack refers to UNIT as "the acceptable face of intelligence-gathering about aliens". He says this secure in the knowledge that the Torchwood Institute has been around far longer than UNIT, since it was founded by Queen Victoria in 1879. Both groups are in the habit of collecting alien technology - in UNIT's case it's stored in the 'Black Archive' Facility, a repository of all extra-terrestrial knowledge and artefacts that UNIT have amassed over the decades. Torchwood, of course, has a policy of not only acquiring, but also reverse-engineering alien technology and adapting it for its own use. (The 'Project Indigo' teleportation back-pack that Martha Jones uses in The Stolen Earth and Journey's End is a rare example of UNIT building on recovered alien tech.)
Of course, the key way in which UNIT and the Torchwood Institute differ is in their attitude to the Doctor - Queen Victoria, after all, declared the Doctor an enemy of Great Britain, founded the Torchwood Institute to defend against alien threats, and had it written into Foundation charter that he was to be apprehended if Torchwood encountered him. UNIT, on the other hand, regard him as a valuable ally, and it's in this difference of attitudes that JJPOR's story lies.
Ground Rules is a meeting between Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart and a Torchwood member of staff who (today at least) is called Starke. The two are having a very tense meeting (in the back of a Jaguar that's driving around London's streets) during which Starke tries to get the Brigadier to hand over the Doctor:
"You have to ask yourself where your loyalties lie, Lethbridge-Stewart," Starke snapped. "Whether your career with UNIT comes first, or your loyalty to Britain."
"Don't talk rubbish, Starke; I've served my country my entire adult life; now I serve not only Britain but the people of this entire planet. Torchwood isn't Britain; Torchwood is a group of old men in a back room somewhere, hoarding alien toys and using them to amass wealth and power over the rest of us. Let's be quite clear about that."
The Brigadier's response is characteristic of this no-nonsense, down-to-Earth soldier. Starke gets annoyed and resorts to attempted blackmail:
Starke sighed wearily, and picked up a dossier that had been resting on the dashboard in front of him.
"I was hoping you wouldn't force me to this," he said, something of his earlier smirk returning. "I was hoping we could resolve this situation like reasonable men. However, you leave me no choice." He handed the file over the seat to the Brigadier. "That's just a free sample; a taster."
Lethbridge-Stewart contemplated the typed pages contained in the folder, the photographs and documents that went with them; lists of home addresses, telephone numbers; lists of home addresses of family members; surveillance photographs of wives and children going about their business; police reports detailing unfortunate youthful indiscretions; different surveillance photographs, taken through bedroom windows with telephoto lenses; some of them were quite explicit in their details.
If Starke thinks to intimidate the Brigadier in this way, though, he really doesn't know his man:
The Brigadier produced his own plain brown dossier, more or less shoved it at Starke. "I really didn't want to do this," he said, insincerely. "It goes against everything I stand for, but I won't be threatened, I won't be blackmailed, and I'll be damned if I'll betray my friend and colleague to an organisation like yours. Those are photocopies, by the way; the originals, and further copies, are deposited with several different law firms and private banks."
"You can't," said Starke, leafing through the file and looking distinctly sick. "The press in this country will never print a word of this; we wouldn't allow it. We know every banker and lawyer in the City; we'll find out where you've hidden these."
"You only control the press in this country," the Brigadier reminded him, with grim satisfaction. "And who said they were deposited in London? Paris, New York, Los Angeles, Geneva, Zurich, Milan, Tokyo, and the rest."
Starke, you see, had forgotten that UNIT is actually an international organisation, unlike the Torchwood Institute. JJPOR doesn't give us any background on Starke, but I wouldn't mind betting he's a desk-bound operative - because it's obvious he doesn’t have the Brigadier's experience of dealing with sticky situations, and he goes away a chastened man.
Vote for this fic because it's well-written, thought-provoking, and quite satisfying if you think that Torchwood are not nearly as clever as they like to believe. Starke is a well-drawn original character - very like the sort of villain you see in 70s TV shows - better at bluster than action, and not nearly as scary as he'd like people to think.
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Shadows of a Different Now by Aeshna Link goes to Teaspoon
Category: Martha Jones
Fandom: New Who
Characters: Martha Jones, Jack Harkness
Rating: All Ages
Details: General, Hurt/Comfort, Standalone
Why It Rocks:
It's a brief look at a moment in the repeated year after Martha Jones spent a year walking the Earth to save it, and it captures Martha's relationship with Jack beautifully.
Fics centring on Martha's experiences during the Year That Never Was (as it's usually known), are pretty common - I know that I've written my own share and I will write more. But, apart from Dan Abnett's The Story of Martha from BBC Books, we've little idea what happened during that hellish year - which means that it's rich territory for fic writers. Aeshna's story is told from Martha's point of view as she relives a day from that Year; she's engaged to Tom Milligan - in fact, he's asleep upstairs as she sits in the kitchen at three in the morning, talking to Jack on her mobile, and reliving one of her experiences while he listens and gently comforts her. It's not the first time she's had a middle-of-the-night conversation with him about that Year, and she suspects it won't be the last - after all, that rewound year was a whole year she's having to live through again, and there's the calendar on the wall:
mocking her, the dates and the cheerfully scrawled notes - dentist appt; Leo's b'day; pick up dry-cleaning - overlaid with a list of names and places that only she can see, with the memories of moving onward, always moving, never resting as she spread her tale and tried to stay alive, even as others laid down their own lives for hers....
And that's the thing that hurts Martha - that others gave their lives so that she would survive, so that she could continue with the crazy, half-arsed plan of travelling the Earth telling everyone about what the Doctor has done for them in order to break the Master's hold on people's minds so that the Doctor can reach them on launch day. And for a trainee doctor travelling a post-apocalyptic Earth, knowing that she's ill-equipped to help the majority of the people whom she'll meet, and also that she can't hang around too long in any one spot because she's got an entire planet to travel in just one year - well, it's a wonder she survived it with her mind and spirit intact, because it would break most people. But Martha is strong, determined, courageous, and not a quitter - as we saw time and again on screen - so while the task seems impossible, she's going to do it, or die trying.
On this particular day that she's recounting to Jack, she was in Canada watching dawn break over Lake Superior - and despite everything that has been happening, she can still see and appreciate the beauty of that daybreak before she goes into the nearest labour camp to tell her story. She tries to tell Jack about a woman she met there, but all she can do is cry, choking on her words, and she apologises to Jack. He tells her she needn't apologise, and she wishes he was there to give her a hug, even as she knows that explaining Jack to Tom would be complicated.
When she gets lost in her recollections Jack grounds her and pulls her back to the here-and-now, and she says:
"I'm here, Jack." She reaches for a tissue, blows her nose. "It's just that sometimes things catch me and it's like I'm there...."
A soft sigh in her ear and she can imagine that hug again. "Martha... you're not. You're here, here and now, and they'll never know what you did for them. But I do."
And she can hear it in his voice - that same faith, that belief that she knows will always be there for her, will be there long after she has gone to dust and the rest of the world has forgotten her name. "Thank you," she whispers, blinking against fresh tears.
Knowing that Jack knows what she did, understands what she went through, and believes in her fiercely is a comfort to Martha, and then, Jack being Jack, he finds a way to cheer her up:
There's a pause and she can almost hear his smile spreading. "So... Martha Jones, it's three in the morning - gonna tell me what you're wearing?"
“Jack!" She doesn't know if she should be scandalised or flattered or what, but it's as if a great weight has suddenly lifted and it feels wonderful. "I'm not -"
"Not what?" he interrupts gleefully. "Not wearing anything? You got a camera on that phone? C'mon, Martha, share...."
Of course, this reduces her to helpless laughter - which is exactly what she needed to help her out of her painful recollections, and is no doubt why he asked the question in the first place. It's not that Jack doesn’t respect Martha's need to share her experiences and grieve for the people who died for her sake - he does, but he also knows that she needs to be able to move past that, to live in the present. He's become an immortal and he's crossed his own timeline more than once so he knows the dangers of being stuck in the past instead of moving forwards to the future. He knows that Martha will only heal if she can deal with her grief and move past the pain - so he listens when she needs to talk, and then he makes her laugh when she's in danger of losing herself in her memories. He's exactly the friend that she needs as she lives through the year the Doctor rewound.
Vote for this fic because it's beautifully written, thoughtful, and perfectly in character for both Martha and Jack.
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Today's Reviews were written by:
azriona: Thirteen
gwynevere1: Five Ways the Bane Didn't...
wendymr: Underneath the Moonlight
unfolded73: Lacunae
persiflage_1: Ground Rules; Shadow of a Different Now
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Thirteen by Aibhinn Link goes to Teaspoon
Categories: Dark, Ficlet, 10.5
Fandom: New Who
Characters: The Doctor, Rose
Rating: Teen
Details: Post-JE, yes, but AU in the sense that it's a future Doctor who is talking to Rose.
Why It Rocks:
Hope is a powerful thing.
There's a whole bunch of fics out there where Rose has been Bad Wolf'ed into immortality - and still shuffled off to Pete's World, to live the slow life with TenII. What sets this one apart, however, is that in most of them, Rose has accepted her immortality, and uses it as sort of incentive to go looking for the Doctor.
Aibhinn, however, realizes that acceptance isn't so easily won. You have to think that Rose would have been a bundle of emotions after the events of JE anyway. Hope, fear, sorrow, joy, disillusionment, anticipation, excitement, loss, grief. But through it all - hope, because she'd been told that she could live out her life with her Doctor. Grow old with him.
Imagine what she might have thought on learning she'd been lied to yet again. She won't grow old with her Doctor - because she won't grow old. Of all the emotions to feel - the loss of hope must surely be the worst.
As is the desire to tell the Doctor exactly what she's feeling. When she meets the Doctor - a new Doctor, by the way - at her Doctor's gravesite, Rose finally gets her chance:
"You bastard," [Rose] hissed. "You left us here with nothing, just a bit of TARDIS coral and away you go without so much as a goodbye. Live a fantastic life, you said. Well, we did, Doctor-until we suddenly realised that my husband looked twenty years older than I did. Then thirty. Then forty. At the end, people thought he was my grandfather. And he had to watch me staying young as he aged, knowing exactly what it was doing to me because he'd been you; he'd spent nine hundred years watching the people he loved wither and die. He had to live the last years of his life knowing that I would be left alone forever, young forever, and there was nothing he could do about it. And you never even told us it would happen."
The loss of hope is a horrible thing, really. In a way, it's worse than never having had hope at all. Rose, who began the events of JE with such hope - hope she'd find the Doctor, hope she'd stay with him - still ended the events with hope. Now we see her with the hope stripped away - this is Rose, bare bones. It's as if that one massive speech to the Doctor - unleashing all of the pain she surely must have felt in the intervening years - has left her a shell of what she formerly was.
"So what now?" Rose asked at last, in a voice that spoke of utter exhaustion, both physical and emotional. She had her hands in her pockets and her shoulders slumped forward, as though she were physically protecting her heart from being broken again.
But to say that the ficlet is entirely without hope would be inaccurate - because there is hope here. It just isn't with Rose. Think about it - why would the Doctor come back, fifty years on, if he hadn't expected to see Rose walking toward him, just as young as the day he'd left her behind? And important to realize - this isn't Ten. This is Thirteen who has returned for Rose. There's been years - lifetimes, really - between the time he left her on a beach in Norway, and finds her standing in an English cemetery. Years, and still he remembers, and returns.
Says the Doctor: "I don't expect anything, Rose, but I hope."
Hope is a powerful thing. One could make the argument that hope is a message strewn throughout Doctor Who. It's certainly strewn through this ficlet. Because now, at long last, the hope that Rose had once, living out her life with the Doctor - it's coming true. It's possible now for them to grow old together. The lies are becoming truth.
In short, vote for Thirteen. There are few stories where we get to watch Rose rip into the Doctor - fewer still where we cheer her on. And it's not often we see hope built, hope destroyed, hope slowly filled up again. And it's my hope that you'll agree that this fic entirely deserves your vote.
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Five Ways the Bane Didn't Return for Luke Smith and One Way They Did by Amilyn Link goes to fanfiction.net
Category: Dark/Angst
Fandom: SJA
Characters: Luke Smith-centric, with appearances by Clyde Langer, Maria Jackson, Sarah Jane Smith, and the Bane
Rating: K
Details: 1,296 words. No spoilers past the First Season.
Why It Rocks:
I love the "five things" genre of fan fiction. The trope started with basingstoke's story Five Things That Aren't True, grew into a challenge, and eventually expanded into one of the most popular fanfic paradigms. One of the other stories I reviewed this round-- Five children that weren't...and one that was--also follows this format.
As for *this* particular "five things" story, I admire how it captures Luke's detached, outsider point-of-view of his relationships and surroundings. For example, one sentence can capture his friendship with Clyde and his confusion over the pursuits of teenaged boys (No, not *those*. It's a children's show, after all, and this fic is rated K):
Clyde quickly dismisses it as "too much time in front of the computer" before dragging him out for a pizza and another attempt to teach him some form of competitive act of physical exertion.
I also adore that Luke celebrates his "Made-day," since he, technically, never had a "birth."
The ways in which the Bane could have returned for Luke are delightful, such as "papaya-flavoured crisps," which-Ew. Just, ew. No wonder Sarah Jane suspects some sort of alien mind-control has to be involved. Who in their right minds would *eat* that?
[Sarah Jane] drops a clue to Torchwood Three (about whom she knows perfectly well, thank you very much), only to find them as enamoured of papaya crisps as the rest of the country.
Oh. Well, that drops the "in their right minds" requirement.
Way Number Five has to be the funniest, though, as Clyde (once again) attempts to teach the very literal Luke about things a teenaged boy should know; in this case, card games:
"Why would [the Bane return]?"
"Uh...revenge? General evil? Hey, keep your cards up."
"We don't even know if there are more of them. How many points are the king cards?"
Clyde rolls his eyes. "Don't tell me your cards either." He sorts his hand. "You mean to tell me they made that genius brain of yours and you didn't get any information about them?"
Nothing, however, tops the awesomeness of Luke outwitting the Bane in the final part, where they canonically could have returned for Luke. I can't say more, because I don't want to give it away!
This story definitely deserves your vote. Nevertheless, I am slightly confused why this was nominated in the Dark/Angst category. I was giggling throughout the five ways the Bane didn't return and cheering for the conclusion of the one way they did.
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Underneath the Moonlight by mad_jaks/itsarift_thing
Category: Ninth Doctor, Romance
Fandom: New Who
Characters: Ninth Doctor, Jack Harkness, Rose Tyler
Rating: PG13
Details: Ficlet, complete, 390 words, OT3 Nine/Rose/Jack
Why It Rocks:
Dancing is a common metaphor in Doctor Who fanfic, and particularly in OT3 fic. Of course, it’s because dancing was used so effectively - and delightfully - as a metaphor in the Ninth Doctor episode The Doctor Dances. I like to think that it’s also so popular in fanfic because dancing is also a metaphor for happiness. For celebration. Let’s face it: the Ninth Doctor had a short and angst-filled life. He was the sole survivor of a war that left him traumatised, and everywhere he turned there were reminders of it. That’s what makes that everybody lives moment so very special.
And so it is in mad_jaks’ story Underneath the Moonlight. The Doctor, Rose and Jack are dancing at an open-air party thrown in their honour by their hosts - we’re not told who these hosts are, other than that they live on an island and they’re shorter than humans. Who they are isn’t important to this story; they’re just scene-setting. Rose is dancing with a local boy, who whirls her around and then dances away to partner another boy, and her gaze falls on the Doctor and Jack, dancing together, vivid in the moonlight that seems to cast them in the spotlight.
The Doctor without his jacket - as naked as he ever gets in public - his sweat damp tee-shirt clinging to his skin; his long, bare feet moving to a subtly different rhythm than the soft hypnotic beat of the village drums - and after the last few days that's hardly surprising, he must be exhausted - but somehow perfectly in synch with Jack.
Oh, did I mention that this little ficlet is also gorgeously sensual, in addition to being happy?
Rose, alone for just a few seconds, gets an opportunity to observe and admire her men. Probably not a rare opportunity, by the sound of things - and an opportunity she clearly appreciates, as do we.
I love the deft character touches revealed along with the eroticism of touch here:
Jack, who tips back his head when the Doctor's fingers bury themselves in his hair - revealing a long expanse of neck, that the Doctor presses his lips against.
In much OT3 fic, Jack’s shown as the aggressor, the persuader, while the Doctor is resistant, reluctant, needing to be seduced. Here, Jack’s willingly submitting, inviting the Doctor’s kiss. And perhaps something more; as Rose muses, Jack:
...can do this for the Doctor - touch him and hold him and help him forget.
Because, even in the midst of celebration, Rose can’t forget - and neither can the readers - that this is the survivor of the Time War, the last of his kind, who needs his companions to help him feel less alone.
So, while on the surface this lovely little ficlet could be read as complete fluff, there are deeper character insights if you’re on the lookout for them. And that’s what sets it apart from pure fluff, and that’s why I really like this story. Though also because this is how I love to imagine my favourite threesome: dancing away under the stars, completely carefree and with all the time in the universe to spend together: happy.
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Lacunae by kenazfiction
Category: Captain Jack Harkness
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Jack, Ianto
Rating: Teen
Details: Jack recovers slowly from what Gray did to him in “Exit Wounds.” 4700 words.
Why it Rocks:
One of the things that has bothered me about the Jack we saw at the end of the Torchwood Series 2 finale (and what we saw of him later on Doctor Who Series 4) was how relatively unaffected he seemed by having been buried under Cardiff for several centuries. Even for the immortal Jack, that many years, that many deaths should have taken a huge toll on his psyche. This story corrects that oversight. It doesn’t make Jack into a raving lunatic - far from it, but it does give a moving and realistic portrayal of a man trying to remember a life that, for him, was two millennia ago.
By now, most of the gaps had closed; the voids where muscle memory didn't quite align with cognition had narrowed to the point where he could convincingly fake his way through a day.
Jack can do all the mundane things he needs to do, although some of them a little slower than he used to. He can load a gun, he can drive a car (although the sequence of driving didn’t come to him immediately). But he’s forgotten huge chunks of his past. We learn through Jack’s internal monologue that he only thought of Gray and of his own mother during the years underground.
The author doesn’t shy away from the horrific torture that Jack must have experienced.
In the liminal space between living and dying there had been room only for pain and panic and time only to think of Gray. He had paid his penance in the currency of gravel in his lungs, in trees that forced their roots through his ribs, in the slow depredation of insects.
Jack has forgotten most of the people and events of his long life. Those memories are gradually coming back, snatches here and there that he must try to fit into the puzzle of his past. He doesn’t overlook the irony of the fact that he’s recently recalled the fact that the Time Agency wiped two years of his memory.
Jack is very closed off at the beginning of this story, and part of the reason is that he doesn’t want to admit to Gwen and Ianto that he had forgotten them, that he still doesn’t remember a lot about his relationship with them. Ianto tries to get him to open up, to connect, but Jack holds him at arm’s length.
Even a liberal application of Captain Jack's patented charm and finesse couldn't turn 'when I finally climbed out of cold storage, I had no idea who you were' into an icebreaker.
The author also addresses why Jack has maintained his Spartan living space under the Hub. Initially it was because he saw his time at Torchwood as temporary; he was only there until he could find the Doctor. Then he kept it our of habit, and now, he keeps it as a sort of penance.
Ianto ultimately doesn’t accept Jack’s rejection. He gently pushes, kissing Jack and urging him to come back to them, to him. I adore that even in the midst of this fairly angsty story, the author maintains Ianto’s wry sense of humour.
He closed his eyes, letting his hands rest on Ianto's thighs and refusing to contemplate the engaging shift of muscle and flesh. "Ianto, I am... damaged."
"Yes," Ianto agreed with a sigh, climbing off his lap and settling on the couch beside him. "Clearly. Profoundly, even." He wove their fingers together. "Look, Jack... when I was six or seven, my father took me to the Electro to see Old Yeller. Do you know that one?" Jack shook his head. "It's about a boy who has to put down his dog after it catches rabies. I cried for days after." He leaned in very earnestly. "Anyway, if you think it would help, I will take you out back and shoot you."
Finally, Jack accepts Ianto’s offer of intimacy, and in so doing, a lot of his memories flood back. As he kisses Ianto, he remembers the first girl he kissed, the first boy he slept with, name after name after name flood his mind. He is a long way from completely healed, but as the story ends, the reader is left with hopefulness.
This story is beautifully written, with breath-taking descriptions and metaphors. Both Jack and Ianto are in-character, and their relationship is handled deftly. I think you’ll be hard-pressed to find a better nominee for the Captain Jack Harkness category.
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Ground Rules by JJPOR Link goes to Teaspoon
Category: Genfic, Ficlet
Fandom: Classic Who
Characters: Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, Sergeant Benton, UNIT, Other Characters
Rating: All Ages
Details: Drama, General, Missing Scene
Why It Rocks:
It answers a question that New Who hasn't yet seen fit to answer: what's UNIT's attitude to Torchwood, particularly with regard to the Doctor?
A bit of background for those of you who've not caught up with Classic Who or UNIT. UNIT's roots lie in two extraterrestrial incursions. The first was related in the Seventh Doctor serial Remembrance of the Daleks when two factions of Daleks fought a battle in London for control of the Time Lord artefact known as 'the Hand of Omega' in late 1963. The two groups were defeated by a detachment of soldiers from the 'Intrusion Counter-Measures Group' (ICMG), which was commanded by Group Captain 'Chunky' Gilmore; he was assisted by the Doctor and a Scientific Advisor named Dr. Rachel Jensen. The ICMG was a special anti-terrorist group which drew its forces from the regular Army and the RAF. The Dalek incident was, of course, covered-up and the ICMG was disbanded shortly afterwards. However, several of its training materials and procedures were adopted by UNIT and Gilmore later served as an adviser, often lecturing to UNIT personnel.
The second incursion (as seen in the Second Doctor serial The Web of Fear), was an attempt to take over London by a disembodied entity known as the Great Intelligence, using robotic Yetis and a deadly cobweb-like fungus. In this instance another small group of British infantrymen, this time led by Colonel Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart of the Scots Guards (and assisted by the Doctor) stopped the attempted conquest in the tunnels of the London Underground.
Following the second incident, the United Nations became aware that the world faced threats from extraterrestrial sources, and that because the space programme was sending probes deeper and deeper into space, mankind was drawing attention to itself. Consequently, the UN established UNIT, giving it a mandate to investigate, monitor and combat such threats. Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart was promoted to the rank of Brigadier and put in charge of the British contingent of UNIT, which was under the purview of the British government's Department C19.
Talking to Gwen Cooper, after Martha Jones arrives at Torchwood Three to assist them, Jack refers to UNIT as "the acceptable face of intelligence-gathering about aliens". He says this secure in the knowledge that the Torchwood Institute has been around far longer than UNIT, since it was founded by Queen Victoria in 1879. Both groups are in the habit of collecting alien technology - in UNIT's case it's stored in the 'Black Archive' Facility, a repository of all extra-terrestrial knowledge and artefacts that UNIT have amassed over the decades. Torchwood, of course, has a policy of not only acquiring, but also reverse-engineering alien technology and adapting it for its own use. (The 'Project Indigo' teleportation back-pack that Martha Jones uses in The Stolen Earth and Journey's End is a rare example of UNIT building on recovered alien tech.)
Of course, the key way in which UNIT and the Torchwood Institute differ is in their attitude to the Doctor - Queen Victoria, after all, declared the Doctor an enemy of Great Britain, founded the Torchwood Institute to defend against alien threats, and had it written into Foundation charter that he was to be apprehended if Torchwood encountered him. UNIT, on the other hand, regard him as a valuable ally, and it's in this difference of attitudes that JJPOR's story lies.
Ground Rules is a meeting between Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart and a Torchwood member of staff who (today at least) is called Starke. The two are having a very tense meeting (in the back of a Jaguar that's driving around London's streets) during which Starke tries to get the Brigadier to hand over the Doctor:
"You have to ask yourself where your loyalties lie, Lethbridge-Stewart," Starke snapped. "Whether your career with UNIT comes first, or your loyalty to Britain."
"Don't talk rubbish, Starke; I've served my country my entire adult life; now I serve not only Britain but the people of this entire planet. Torchwood isn't Britain; Torchwood is a group of old men in a back room somewhere, hoarding alien toys and using them to amass wealth and power over the rest of us. Let's be quite clear about that."
The Brigadier's response is characteristic of this no-nonsense, down-to-Earth soldier. Starke gets annoyed and resorts to attempted blackmail:
Starke sighed wearily, and picked up a dossier that had been resting on the dashboard in front of him.
"I was hoping you wouldn't force me to this," he said, something of his earlier smirk returning. "I was hoping we could resolve this situation like reasonable men. However, you leave me no choice." He handed the file over the seat to the Brigadier. "That's just a free sample; a taster."
Lethbridge-Stewart contemplated the typed pages contained in the folder, the photographs and documents that went with them; lists of home addresses, telephone numbers; lists of home addresses of family members; surveillance photographs of wives and children going about their business; police reports detailing unfortunate youthful indiscretions; different surveillance photographs, taken through bedroom windows with telephoto lenses; some of them were quite explicit in their details.
If Starke thinks to intimidate the Brigadier in this way, though, he really doesn't know his man:
The Brigadier produced his own plain brown dossier, more or less shoved it at Starke. "I really didn't want to do this," he said, insincerely. "It goes against everything I stand for, but I won't be threatened, I won't be blackmailed, and I'll be damned if I'll betray my friend and colleague to an organisation like yours. Those are photocopies, by the way; the originals, and further copies, are deposited with several different law firms and private banks."
"You can't," said Starke, leafing through the file and looking distinctly sick. "The press in this country will never print a word of this; we wouldn't allow it. We know every banker and lawyer in the City; we'll find out where you've hidden these."
"You only control the press in this country," the Brigadier reminded him, with grim satisfaction. "And who said they were deposited in London? Paris, New York, Los Angeles, Geneva, Zurich, Milan, Tokyo, and the rest."
Starke, you see, had forgotten that UNIT is actually an international organisation, unlike the Torchwood Institute. JJPOR doesn't give us any background on Starke, but I wouldn't mind betting he's a desk-bound operative - because it's obvious he doesn’t have the Brigadier's experience of dealing with sticky situations, and he goes away a chastened man.
Vote for this fic because it's well-written, thought-provoking, and quite satisfying if you think that Torchwood are not nearly as clever as they like to believe. Starke is a well-drawn original character - very like the sort of villain you see in 70s TV shows - better at bluster than action, and not nearly as scary as he'd like people to think.
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Shadows of a Different Now by Aeshna Link goes to Teaspoon
Category: Martha Jones
Fandom: New Who
Characters: Martha Jones, Jack Harkness
Rating: All Ages
Details: General, Hurt/Comfort, Standalone
Why It Rocks:
It's a brief look at a moment in the repeated year after Martha Jones spent a year walking the Earth to save it, and it captures Martha's relationship with Jack beautifully.
Fics centring on Martha's experiences during the Year That Never Was (as it's usually known), are pretty common - I know that I've written my own share and I will write more. But, apart from Dan Abnett's The Story of Martha from BBC Books, we've little idea what happened during that hellish year - which means that it's rich territory for fic writers. Aeshna's story is told from Martha's point of view as she relives a day from that Year; she's engaged to Tom Milligan - in fact, he's asleep upstairs as she sits in the kitchen at three in the morning, talking to Jack on her mobile, and reliving one of her experiences while he listens and gently comforts her. It's not the first time she's had a middle-of-the-night conversation with him about that Year, and she suspects it won't be the last - after all, that rewound year was a whole year she's having to live through again, and there's the calendar on the wall:
mocking her, the dates and the cheerfully scrawled notes - dentist appt; Leo's b'day; pick up dry-cleaning - overlaid with a list of names and places that only she can see, with the memories of moving onward, always moving, never resting as she spread her tale and tried to stay alive, even as others laid down their own lives for hers....
And that's the thing that hurts Martha - that others gave their lives so that she would survive, so that she could continue with the crazy, half-arsed plan of travelling the Earth telling everyone about what the Doctor has done for them in order to break the Master's hold on people's minds so that the Doctor can reach them on launch day. And for a trainee doctor travelling a post-apocalyptic Earth, knowing that she's ill-equipped to help the majority of the people whom she'll meet, and also that she can't hang around too long in any one spot because she's got an entire planet to travel in just one year - well, it's a wonder she survived it with her mind and spirit intact, because it would break most people. But Martha is strong, determined, courageous, and not a quitter - as we saw time and again on screen - so while the task seems impossible, she's going to do it, or die trying.
On this particular day that she's recounting to Jack, she was in Canada watching dawn break over Lake Superior - and despite everything that has been happening, she can still see and appreciate the beauty of that daybreak before she goes into the nearest labour camp to tell her story. She tries to tell Jack about a woman she met there, but all she can do is cry, choking on her words, and she apologises to Jack. He tells her she needn't apologise, and she wishes he was there to give her a hug, even as she knows that explaining Jack to Tom would be complicated.
When she gets lost in her recollections Jack grounds her and pulls her back to the here-and-now, and she says:
"I'm here, Jack." She reaches for a tissue, blows her nose. "It's just that sometimes things catch me and it's like I'm there...."
A soft sigh in her ear and she can imagine that hug again. "Martha... you're not. You're here, here and now, and they'll never know what you did for them. But I do."
And she can hear it in his voice - that same faith, that belief that she knows will always be there for her, will be there long after she has gone to dust and the rest of the world has forgotten her name. "Thank you," she whispers, blinking against fresh tears.
Knowing that Jack knows what she did, understands what she went through, and believes in her fiercely is a comfort to Martha, and then, Jack being Jack, he finds a way to cheer her up:
There's a pause and she can almost hear his smile spreading. "So... Martha Jones, it's three in the morning - gonna tell me what you're wearing?"
“Jack!" She doesn't know if she should be scandalised or flattered or what, but it's as if a great weight has suddenly lifted and it feels wonderful. "I'm not -"
"Not what?" he interrupts gleefully. "Not wearing anything? You got a camera on that phone? C'mon, Martha, share...."
Of course, this reduces her to helpless laughter - which is exactly what she needed to help her out of her painful recollections, and is no doubt why he asked the question in the first place. It's not that Jack doesn’t respect Martha's need to share her experiences and grieve for the people who died for her sake - he does, but he also knows that she needs to be able to move past that, to live in the present. He's become an immortal and he's crossed his own timeline more than once so he knows the dangers of being stuck in the past instead of moving forwards to the future. He knows that Martha will only heal if she can deal with her grief and move past the pain - so he listens when she needs to talk, and then he makes her laugh when she's in danger of losing herself in her memories. He's exactly the friend that she needs as she lives through the year the Doctor rewound.
Vote for this fic because it's beautifully written, thoughtful, and perfectly in character for both Martha and Jack.
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Today's Reviews were written by:
azriona: Thirteen
gwynevere1: Five Ways the Bane Didn't...
wendymr: Underneath the Moonlight
unfolded73: Lacunae
persiflage_1: Ground Rules; Shadow of a Different Now