Round Two Reviews - Part Seven
Today's Featured Stories Include:
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Doesn't Look Like a Hell Dimension by Kathryn Andersen Link goes to external site
Category: Crossover
Characters: Ten, Buffy Summers
Rating: PG
Details: One-shot, AU cross-over with Buffy the Vampire Slayer. For Doctor Who, takes place at the end of Doomsday. For Buffy, takes place at the end of The Gift.
Why It Rocks:
I've read a bit of Buffy-fic in my day. Not a lot, mind you, but enough. Not that it's not out there, but that the good stuff can be hard to find.
There's one I particularly liked, Buffy/Spike and seriously epic, and Willow was a vampire and there was a trip to Disneyland and it was just awesome. I'm sort of off-topic. I lost the link about a year ago, it's very sad. Sorry.
I've also read Buffy crossover fic before. Not a lot, mind you, mostly because it was kind of...weird. Buffy is such an insular world, you see - it doesn't lend itself to being squished with other fandoms very easily. You can squish Harry Potter, because the magical world is meant to be hidden away. You can squish Hitchhiker's, because we're not meant to know about it, anyway.
But Buffy? Not so easily squished.
Kathryn makes it look easy, and she's done this by taking one time, in each show, when Buffy and the Doctor would have stood a shot of intersecting - by taking the one aspect of the shows that they had in common.
Buffy, in an act of sacrifice, at the end of Season Five, throws herself into a dimension portal to stop the end of the World.
And the Doctor, at the end of Season Two, closes a crack in dimensions, stop the worlds from collapsing.
The TARDIS pulls someone into the ship at that moment. Sure, it was Donna - but what if there'd been someone more convenient...already dropping in through a rift...
[The Doctor] stood behind a giant toadstool built by a mad scientist; it had knobs and dials and glowed with an eerie blue-green light. It was joined to the ceiling by a glass column, glowing white. Maybe he was a mad scientist himself, but [Buffy] didn't think they wore suits.
What's interesting about seeing the Doctor through the eyes of Buffy Summers is that she's not unaware of abnormalities. This is a girl, after all, who's faced vampires and demons and the odd witch or two. It's just that none of them were extra-terrestrial. (Although I suppose one could make an argument for the Rift and the Hellhole being sort of the same thing. Now, there's a Buffy/Torchwood crossover for you. Except the combination of Jack Harkness and Spike is kind of...scary. Oh, wait, we had that already, sort of. Nevermind.) Buffy is going to recognize the Doctor - if not for what he is, then at least for what he's not.
It kind of reminds me of a scene from From the Earth to the Moon, actually. You know, the space movie where Tom Hanks did all the intros, and it was all about the Apollo program. In the tenth episode, Galileo Was Right, the story focused on how the astronauts learned to be geologists, so that when they landed on the moon, they could accurately describe the topography in terms that a geologist could understand. Not just "Ooo, it's a mountain", but "Hey, that mountain, it's got peaks that do this and falls that do that, and it appears to be this and that and the other thing besides."
Now, most of us, we see something that's not quite human, and we'll say, "Hey, that's not human." Buffy Summers, though, she looks at something, and says, "Hey, your face has this ridges and your nose is protruding in this odd way and your eyes are this molten glowy shade of the lipstick I wore last Sunday."
(Probably just like that, too, but Giles would at least have a clue as to what she meant.)
The contrast between [the Doctor's] frown and his smile was unnerving. No, it wasn't that. His liveliness had been camouflage; underneath was something very old, and very dangerous. But Angel had been old and dangerous too. Being dangerous wasn't the same as being evil.
The thing is - it's not exactly by accident that Buffy is the one to appear. It's hard to imagine what might have happened had Donna not appeared. Well, not so hard, if you've seen Turn Left. But still - she shook the Doctor out of his self-induced sorrow, and focused him on the problem at hand: namely, her.
Buffy's arrival is a little bit different. Yes, she focuses him away from the non-goodbye with Rose - but her problem is entirely different. In that, her problem is entirely the same. She's fallen into a different dimension. She's never going to be able to return home. All the people she loved, she's lost. It's worse than being dead, because it's being alive, and never seeing them again.
"Sometimes..."
She looked up, catching the bleakness in his voice.
"Sometimes we get what we don't want," he said. "You say to yourself, this is worth dying for; and then the impossible happens: you live." He wasn't looking at her; he was looking past her, into memories. Cold, dark memories. "And it's something you didn't prepare for, living. They're all gone, there's nothing left, and yet you live. And you can't let go, because life doesn't want to die, not for nothing. Not when you've already died for something."
No, it's not Donna who appeared in the TARDIS console room. And it's not Donna who will be there to stop the Doctor's hand when the world is going wrong.
But that's okay, because just as he found a kindred soul in Donna - there's one in Buffy, too. They're two of a kind Buffy and the Doctor. And they'll be all right.
In short, vote for Doesn't Look Like a Hell Dimension. It's sweetly endearing and entirely too right. It's the adventure you'd like Buffy to have, and the shoulder the Doctor could lean on. It's what could have happened, if Donna hadn't, and it's an excellent way to mesh the worlds. It's entirely deserving of your vote.
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When Everything Changed by LJGeoff
Category: Episode Tag
Characters: Ten, Rose
Rating: Adult (R-ish)
Details: One-shot, takes place immediately after Idiot's Lantern.
Why It Rocks:
Exactly what it says on the tin: this is, quite simply, when everything changed between the Doctor and Rose. He's taken her to the end of the world, he's sent her home safe from his own destruction, he's left her behind on a 51st century spaceship and he's shown her parallel worlds.
But he's never actually had to see Rose, not-Rose, stripped of everything about her. Every time he's lost her, he's lost all of her.
Deep in the night, then, when Rose lays sleeping, is when he creeps to her bedroom, to look at her face, newly restored, to try to dispel the awful memory of her non-face.
he traced her features slowly, measuring them against his memory, erasing the image that kept thrusting itself on him
It's this theme that LJG repeats, over and over. Eyes, nose, lips. The Doctor drinks them in, as you do a glass of water on a hot and thirsty day. Chin, cheeks, lashes. He can barely breathe...and then Rose wakes up.
They were breathing in time, she noticed, both of them taking shallow breaths between parted lips. She wet her lips with a flick of her tongue and pressed them together, taking a long, deep breath through her nose. His eyes were too dark, so she let her lids fall closed...
And it continues, on her side, this inspection of facial features, first with their eyes, and then with their fingers, as they oh-so-carefully and cautiously commit to touch what previously, only their eyes have memorized. Eyes, nose, lips. Chin, cheek, lashes. Again and again, over and over, almost a litany whispered in a dark room.
What follows is an absolutely quiet, perfect, intimate moment - and it's not about the fact that we leave them just as everything changes. (Because we do - LJG is very good at dropping that curtain, and leaving Rose and the Doctor be.) But this story isn't about the kiss, or the sex. It's about this one moment, in which everything does, and not the change itself. It's about the utter intimacy in touching another's face, in the dark of a room, words unspoken.
And think on this - those of you who have husbands/wives/lovers of a sort - how often do you touch their face, but in the most intimate of times? And why? It's a meaningful thing, more so than holding hands, or even hugging. There's something about the touch of a face that can't be misinterpreted as anything but love.
We don't need the loving that is sure to follow, after LJG has dropped her curtain. We've already seen what changes the relationship between Rose and the Doctor. The rest - well, we like it, but it's just the frill, isn't it? This, this moment in the dark, with him touching her cheek, and her touching his, that's the real moment here. That's the moment when it changes.
In short, vote for When Everything Changed. It's sweet and tender and sensual. It's a lovely song in the dark, and a quiet moment of turmoil before peace. It's haunting and searching and finding, and it hits all the right notes. It absolutely deserves your vote.
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Ever the Same by surrexi Link goes to community journal
Category: Episode Tag
Characters: TenII, Rose
Rating: PG
Details: Now, this is just neat. It's a soundtrack with ficlets for each song - thirteen ficlets and songs in all, following an overall post-JE arc.
Why It Rocks:
Oh, I love fics that show some serious amount of thought.
And Surrexi has put some serious thought into this lovely set. What we have here is a complete downloadable soundtrack to the lives of TenII and Rose, with individual fics for every song. Thirteen songs, thirteen ficlets, thirteen little snapshots about their life together. We even get thirteen thumbnails. It's just...neat.
Of course, it's easy to go all "squee" over the packaging. What's really important is what we find on actually reading. And what we find does not disappoint.
The first thing that strikes me - as it always does - is the music. I had a professor in college once tell the class (it was a video production class; we were making music videos) that people, as a rule, don't listen to the lyrics. I was raised on Broadway; I disagree with this. (And an informal poll on my LJ agrees with me - or did as I was writing this.) Especially with these songs, these fics - the lyrics and the songs resonate with each other.
Take the first pairing: Ryan Adams' Wonderwall, with TenII, on the TARDIS as it tows the Earth back to place.
The Lyrics:
I don't believe that anybody feels
The way I do about you now
...There are many things that I would
Like to say to you
But I don't know how
The Fic:
He concentrates on Rose because he is even more full of her as a human than he was as a Time Lord. Two hearts’ worth of love crammed into one, entire dictionaries’ worth of words he’d never have said before tumbling over each other on the tip of his tongue, and that’s just the beginning.
The song is basically being sung by a guy about a girl - he's got feelings for her (presumably romantic), but he just can't express them yet. All he knows is that the way he feels - no one else could possibly feel this way.
It's the same with TenII - as Surrexi says, he's got two hearts worth of love shoved into one. Ten might feel the same, but his love is diluted, spread out a little. TenII feels it more acutely. And while he's got the ability to say those three words to Rose - he can't, just yet. They aren't quite formed, but they will be.
And if you still have doubt that the song and the man go together - Noel Gallagher, who wrote the song for Oasis back in 1995, said the following: "It's a song about an imaginary friend who's gonna come and save you from yourself."
Okay, maybe Rose isn't imaginary. But Ten point-blank tells her that she'll save TenII. And TenII knows it.
Surrexi even refers back to this song in a later ficlet, having TenII actually ruminate about how there are so many things he wants to say to her now - almost a direct quote from the song.
I think another of my favorite pairings here is the fifth one - Rob Thomas's Ever the Same, and a ficlet about the Doctor, learning to be comfortable in his own skin, in the new world around him.
The Lyrics:
You were holding to me
Like a someone broken
And I couldn't tell you but I'm telling you now
Just let me hold you while you're falling apart
The Fic:
That night, they fall asleep in each other’s arms in the center of the bed (pyjamas on), soothed into undisturbed slumber by a small machine in the corner. It isn’t perfect, but the low hum it emits is like an aural security blanket, and the Doctor feels at home for the first time in weeks.
What I love about this particular pairing, is that the Doctor is being held in comfort not only by Rose, but by the machine in the corner, giving him the auditory security blanket he needs to feel at home. And again Surrexi will throw back to this song, and this image, by later stating that he no longer needs the security blanket of the machine to sleep - Rose is not only enough, but she's become home for him, just as he was always (ever) home for her.
But I think the best pairing of all is the next to last:
The Lyrics:
We'll lock the world outside
Embrace the gift of time
Promising forever
Knowing that this moment
Might be all we ever find
The Fic:
He can still feel it passing, every second whipping down his neurons, months going by like seconds used to pass before. He used to be a lord of Time, but he thinks he never understood its true value until he stopped being a lord of anything.
At the end of the day, it's about the passage of time. In every TenII fic, the very fact that he is mortal, that he is slowly slipping toward the inevitable death that awaits him - this is examined, and studied, and set aside.
The passage of time, however, isn't just about the Doctor - it's about everything, and everyone around him. It's about the progression of things, how every moment of your life you're building upon the first. It's a little like a song, actually - a few notes, a few instruments, before adding a few more, blossoming into something deeper and richer than you might have imagined in those first few bars. A song tells a story. A story, properly told, is musical. They go hand in hand, really.
Clever of Surrexi to realize that.
In short, vote for Ever the Same. It's an amazing amount of research, time, effort, and talent on several levels. It's an entire package that will bring tears to your eyes and a lump to your throat. It's something you'll remember long after the songs have played out, and as such, it's absolutely deserving of your vote.
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Hiding in Plain Sight by Gillian Taylor aka dark_aegis
Category: Nine/Rose
Characters: Rose, Alt!Nine, Alt!Donna, Mickey
Rating: Teen
Details: Five chapters, AU post-Doomsday, but elements of Human Nature. Anything else gives it away.
Why It Rocks:
The thing about grief - it doesn't exactly fade. But the details that make it stronger, that give grief its sharp edges, those fade. They say that grief becomes easier to bear after a while - I don't think that's quite so, because as those details become fuzzy, grief takes on a whole different meaning.
Rose, stuck in the parallel world, wanting nothing more to return and find her Doctor, knows about the details fading away.
Used to be that all she had to do was close her eyes and ask herself what would the Doctor say about this or that and she’d be able to hear his voice. Not any more. The ideas are there. A bit of his babbling, too. But not his accent. Estuary, wasn’t it?
But there's this as well: for all that Rose misses her Doctor - there's the indisputable fact that he sent her away - not once, but twice. Every time her Doctor left her (either through regeneration or the Void), it was shortly after he'd tried to send her away. It's not the mangled goodbye on the beach that Rose remembers. It's the actions of three months before that she can't shake - it's the knowledge that somewhere, he continues on, without her.
Besides, does he really want her back? She doesn't doubt he misses her. But he said it, didn't he? The whole wither and die conversation after Sarah Jane. And if he does leave her behind again, where will she go? Her mum won't leave her dad here. Mickey's not leaving. And in that other universe she'll be completely reliant on him.
And so Rose goes on with her days, working with Torchwood, solving mysteries, chasing the aliens. She doesn't expect to see the Doctor again, of course - and this fact, more than any other, is what gives her the most despair. So when she does see a familiar face - that of the blue eyes, and large ears, set above a leather jacket - Rose can't help but shake the idea that it's him.
(It doesn't hurt that he's rescuing her, either, from an alien force. That's kind of the way it goes between them, after all.)
We learn that this man, however, isn't quite Rose's Doctor. He's familiar to us, yes, both in mannerisms and facial features, but the details of his life are different. He's got a sister named Donna, a job as a DI, a generic name of John Smith...and a fobwatch with a circular design. Yes, friends, it's Alt!Nine with a fobwatch. But the story isn't so much about Nine and the "to open or not to open" debate. This story is about Rose, and her own debate, which John catches all too well. With the aliens at the door, and doom and destruction looming, Rose asks him to open the watch, to bring back the Doctor, even if it means his own death.
John, however - who has been somehow, strangely fascinated by Rose all this time, all along noting that there's something not quite right about her presence - John realizes something about Rose's request.
"We need you," Rose says.
"We?" he echoes, almost scoffing. "Or jus' you?"
Does Rose ask on behalf of the Earth? Or does she ask for her own interests? She hasn't been chasing the Doctor, not explicitly in the story. But she has gone to him, she's questioned him, she's told him that she knows who he is. To him, she must sound crazy - or frighteningly familiar.
And John, too, finds himself inexplicably drawn to this girl. One has to wonder if he wouldn't open the watch if she asked and the fate of the Earth wasn't at stake.
But it is, and he's too much himself, even as a human, to risk it.
There are tears in Rose's voice as she says, "I'll promise to go away an' never try to talk to you again. Just please open that watch."
One has to wonder - does Rose mean it? She's missed her Doctor for so long - and having found John Smith, she didn't rest until she spoke to him. Does she even believe in what she promises? Is that why she's crying, because she knows she'll have to keep that promise?
Or is she crying, because this Doctor isn't her Doctor, and she's hoping she won't have to?
The story does not end with John opening the watch - because that's not the point of the story. It's not the Doctor hiding in plain sight - it's Rose. Living her life, hardly quiet, working with the one organization whose sole existance was due to the one man she hoped to find again.
You see, Rose was left in the parallel world knowing two things: the first, that Torchwood was created by the Doctor himself. And the second - the Doctor doesn't always know everything. He said, yes, that there was only one of him.
But then how are there two Torchwoods?
She's going to be okay. She doesn't have to spend her life looking around corners, hoping against hope that her Doctor's done the impossible again and come for her. She doesn't have to work on dimension cannons or try to find different routes back to her old universe. She can't let that define her life. So she won't. Because now she knows she's not really all alone in this universe, playing the Doctor.
The Doctor is here. And that's absolutely brilliant.
In short, vote for Hiding in Plain Sight. It's a fun look at Human Nature and human nature both; it's got Donna and Mickey and an extremely uncomfortable conversation over coffee. It's affirming and sweet, and you will end with a smile on your face, and it's entirely deserving of your vote.
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Precious Little Space Dumplings of Love by shaggydogstail
Category: Ten/Master
Characters: Ten, the Master
Rating: NC-17
Details: One-shot, post-LoTL AU where the Master doesn't die. The first half is crack, the second is slash.
Why it Rocks:
Perhaps the Master puts it best: It’s a shame to waste how cute we both are this time around. And there's always been something inherently slashy about the way the Doctor and the Master interacted. The Doctor, who had so much trust and hope in the Master, convinced that the man could be good...and the Master, so doggedly determined to prove him wrong.
Totally like a friendship gone horribly, horribly wrong.
Plus, you know, there's a long tradition of fanfic being inherently slashy anyway. (No, seriously, that's a Wikipedia entry on the history of slash in fanfic. I KID YOU NOT.)
But this particular slash story regarding the Doctor and the Master is noteworthy for one main reason: It's Just Plain Funny.
Putting up with the Doctor’s unnatural levels of sanctimony would drive a lesser Time Lord to distraction. But that’s not the worst of it.
The worst part is that he’s so bloody bored.
It's not that the Master actually wants to have sex - although he certainly wouldn't mind. It's that he's just bored. He's trapped on the TARDIS, he's tired of mutiny (which doesn't work anyway), he really doesn't want to hear the Doctor babble at him - so what's left, but trying to shock the Doctor. And the best way to shock our mostly asexual Doctor is by talking about sex.
For the most part, it works. Except the Doctor doesn't really take the Master seriously. For one thing, the Doctor can't actually believe that the Master really wants to have sex. For another, as the Master correctly assumes - there's the guilt-factor.
'Are you worried that it might be unethical to sleep with me while I am, technically, your prisoner, hm? Because, really, I don’t think you need to concern yourself with that. Once you’ve got a couple of genocides under your belt a spot of sexual impropriety is neither here nor there.’
One of the clever things that Shaggy's done here is to reverse the roles a little bit. The story is told from the Master's POV, which really suits a crack!fic extremely well. It also turns the tables just a bit - we see the Doctor not as the long-suffering Time Lord, but as the slightly sanctimonious know-it-all.
The Doctor looked up from the Secret Project he was working on (another bone of contention - the bastard was clearly Up To Something, but the Master didn’t like to give him the satisfaction of asking) and gave him one of his tediously patient looks.
The Doctor is the slightly nefarious one - we're almost on the Master's side here. How dare the Doctor keep our poor bored Master out of the loop!
So really, the only way to actually get these two to do anything is to create a catalyst. In the form of the classic shag-or-die scenario - although in this case, it's shag-or-be-locked-away-for-a-few-centuries. Which leads to what has got to be the most hysterical courtroom scene I've ever read. Who knew the Master could ham it up that much? He seems to take even the Doctor by surprise with his carrying-on. And he certainly makes an impression on the authorities:
‘They’re awfully sweet, aren’t they?’ sighed the court clerk.
‘They’re prime candidates for psychiatric screening,’ said the magistrate.
And really, when it's all said and done...and the Master and the Doctor are released into society...there's just one small matter to clear up.
Will they actually do it? And why on earth would they want to?
‘Because once we got back to the TARDIS I’m going to be locked up with you and your endless sanctimonious attempts at salvaging my character for at least a hundred years,’ said the Master. ‘Having the memory of you all desperate and sweating, begging me for more is the only thing that might make the long winter evenings even remotely bearable.’
Well...he does have a point.
In short, vote for Precious Little Space Dumplings of Love. It's got seriously funny banter, Jack Harkness's diary, discussions of what is proper to sell on eBay, and a really interesting set of aliens. It's got fandom cliches turned on their head, an extremely supportive wall, and the Doctor being cuddly. You will never call your loved one "dumpling" again without giggling, and that alone makes this fic deserving of your vote.
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All of today's reviews were written by azriona.
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Doesn't Look Like a Hell Dimension by Kathryn Andersen Link goes to external site
Category: Crossover
Characters: Ten, Buffy Summers
Rating: PG
Details: One-shot, AU cross-over with Buffy the Vampire Slayer. For Doctor Who, takes place at the end of Doomsday. For Buffy, takes place at the end of The Gift.
Why It Rocks:
I've read a bit of Buffy-fic in my day. Not a lot, mind you, but enough. Not that it's not out there, but that the good stuff can be hard to find.
There's one I particularly liked, Buffy/Spike and seriously epic, and Willow was a vampire and there was a trip to Disneyland and it was just awesome. I'm sort of off-topic. I lost the link about a year ago, it's very sad. Sorry.
I've also read Buffy crossover fic before. Not a lot, mind you, mostly because it was kind of...weird. Buffy is such an insular world, you see - it doesn't lend itself to being squished with other fandoms very easily. You can squish Harry Potter, because the magical world is meant to be hidden away. You can squish Hitchhiker's, because we're not meant to know about it, anyway.
But Buffy? Not so easily squished.
Kathryn makes it look easy, and she's done this by taking one time, in each show, when Buffy and the Doctor would have stood a shot of intersecting - by taking the one aspect of the shows that they had in common.
Buffy, in an act of sacrifice, at the end of Season Five, throws herself into a dimension portal to stop the end of the World.
And the Doctor, at the end of Season Two, closes a crack in dimensions, stop the worlds from collapsing.
The TARDIS pulls someone into the ship at that moment. Sure, it was Donna - but what if there'd been someone more convenient...already dropping in through a rift...
[The Doctor] stood behind a giant toadstool built by a mad scientist; it had knobs and dials and glowed with an eerie blue-green light. It was joined to the ceiling by a glass column, glowing white. Maybe he was a mad scientist himself, but [Buffy] didn't think they wore suits.
What's interesting about seeing the Doctor through the eyes of Buffy Summers is that she's not unaware of abnormalities. This is a girl, after all, who's faced vampires and demons and the odd witch or two. It's just that none of them were extra-terrestrial. (Although I suppose one could make an argument for the Rift and the Hellhole being sort of the same thing. Now, there's a Buffy/Torchwood crossover for you. Except the combination of Jack Harkness and Spike is kind of...scary. Oh, wait, we had that already, sort of. Nevermind.) Buffy is going to recognize the Doctor - if not for what he is, then at least for what he's not.
It kind of reminds me of a scene from From the Earth to the Moon, actually. You know, the space movie where Tom Hanks did all the intros, and it was all about the Apollo program. In the tenth episode, Galileo Was Right, the story focused on how the astronauts learned to be geologists, so that when they landed on the moon, they could accurately describe the topography in terms that a geologist could understand. Not just "Ooo, it's a mountain", but "Hey, that mountain, it's got peaks that do this and falls that do that, and it appears to be this and that and the other thing besides."
Now, most of us, we see something that's not quite human, and we'll say, "Hey, that's not human." Buffy Summers, though, she looks at something, and says, "Hey, your face has this ridges and your nose is protruding in this odd way and your eyes are this molten glowy shade of the lipstick I wore last Sunday."
(Probably just like that, too, but Giles would at least have a clue as to what she meant.)
The contrast between [the Doctor's] frown and his smile was unnerving. No, it wasn't that. His liveliness had been camouflage; underneath was something very old, and very dangerous. But Angel had been old and dangerous too. Being dangerous wasn't the same as being evil.
The thing is - it's not exactly by accident that Buffy is the one to appear. It's hard to imagine what might have happened had Donna not appeared. Well, not so hard, if you've seen Turn Left. But still - she shook the Doctor out of his self-induced sorrow, and focused him on the problem at hand: namely, her.
Buffy's arrival is a little bit different. Yes, she focuses him away from the non-goodbye with Rose - but her problem is entirely different. In that, her problem is entirely the same. She's fallen into a different dimension. She's never going to be able to return home. All the people she loved, she's lost. It's worse than being dead, because it's being alive, and never seeing them again.
"Sometimes..."
She looked up, catching the bleakness in his voice.
"Sometimes we get what we don't want," he said. "You say to yourself, this is worth dying for; and then the impossible happens: you live." He wasn't looking at her; he was looking past her, into memories. Cold, dark memories. "And it's something you didn't prepare for, living. They're all gone, there's nothing left, and yet you live. And you can't let go, because life doesn't want to die, not for nothing. Not when you've already died for something."
No, it's not Donna who appeared in the TARDIS console room. And it's not Donna who will be there to stop the Doctor's hand when the world is going wrong.
But that's okay, because just as he found a kindred soul in Donna - there's one in Buffy, too. They're two of a kind Buffy and the Doctor. And they'll be all right.
In short, vote for Doesn't Look Like a Hell Dimension. It's sweetly endearing and entirely too right. It's the adventure you'd like Buffy to have, and the shoulder the Doctor could lean on. It's what could have happened, if Donna hadn't, and it's an excellent way to mesh the worlds. It's entirely deserving of your vote.
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When Everything Changed by LJGeoff
Category: Episode Tag
Characters: Ten, Rose
Rating: Adult (R-ish)
Details: One-shot, takes place immediately after Idiot's Lantern.
Why It Rocks:
Exactly what it says on the tin: this is, quite simply, when everything changed between the Doctor and Rose. He's taken her to the end of the world, he's sent her home safe from his own destruction, he's left her behind on a 51st century spaceship and he's shown her parallel worlds.
But he's never actually had to see Rose, not-Rose, stripped of everything about her. Every time he's lost her, he's lost all of her.
Deep in the night, then, when Rose lays sleeping, is when he creeps to her bedroom, to look at her face, newly restored, to try to dispel the awful memory of her non-face.
he traced her features slowly, measuring them against his memory, erasing the image that kept thrusting itself on him
It's this theme that LJG repeats, over and over. Eyes, nose, lips. The Doctor drinks them in, as you do a glass of water on a hot and thirsty day. Chin, cheeks, lashes. He can barely breathe...and then Rose wakes up.
They were breathing in time, she noticed, both of them taking shallow breaths between parted lips. She wet her lips with a flick of her tongue and pressed them together, taking a long, deep breath through her nose. His eyes were too dark, so she let her lids fall closed...
And it continues, on her side, this inspection of facial features, first with their eyes, and then with their fingers, as they oh-so-carefully and cautiously commit to touch what previously, only their eyes have memorized. Eyes, nose, lips. Chin, cheek, lashes. Again and again, over and over, almost a litany whispered in a dark room.
What follows is an absolutely quiet, perfect, intimate moment - and it's not about the fact that we leave them just as everything changes. (Because we do - LJG is very good at dropping that curtain, and leaving Rose and the Doctor be.) But this story isn't about the kiss, or the sex. It's about this one moment, in which everything does, and not the change itself. It's about the utter intimacy in touching another's face, in the dark of a room, words unspoken.
And think on this - those of you who have husbands/wives/lovers of a sort - how often do you touch their face, but in the most intimate of times? And why? It's a meaningful thing, more so than holding hands, or even hugging. There's something about the touch of a face that can't be misinterpreted as anything but love.
We don't need the loving that is sure to follow, after LJG has dropped her curtain. We've already seen what changes the relationship between Rose and the Doctor. The rest - well, we like it, but it's just the frill, isn't it? This, this moment in the dark, with him touching her cheek, and her touching his, that's the real moment here. That's the moment when it changes.
In short, vote for When Everything Changed. It's sweet and tender and sensual. It's a lovely song in the dark, and a quiet moment of turmoil before peace. It's haunting and searching and finding, and it hits all the right notes. It absolutely deserves your vote.
*
Ever the Same by surrexi Link goes to community journal
Category: Episode Tag
Characters: TenII, Rose
Rating: PG
Details: Now, this is just neat. It's a soundtrack with ficlets for each song - thirteen ficlets and songs in all, following an overall post-JE arc.
Why It Rocks:
Oh, I love fics that show some serious amount of thought.
And Surrexi has put some serious thought into this lovely set. What we have here is a complete downloadable soundtrack to the lives of TenII and Rose, with individual fics for every song. Thirteen songs, thirteen ficlets, thirteen little snapshots about their life together. We even get thirteen thumbnails. It's just...neat.
Of course, it's easy to go all "squee" over the packaging. What's really important is what we find on actually reading. And what we find does not disappoint.
The first thing that strikes me - as it always does - is the music. I had a professor in college once tell the class (it was a video production class; we were making music videos) that people, as a rule, don't listen to the lyrics. I was raised on Broadway; I disagree with this. (And an informal poll on my LJ agrees with me - or did as I was writing this.) Especially with these songs, these fics - the lyrics and the songs resonate with each other.
Take the first pairing: Ryan Adams' Wonderwall, with TenII, on the TARDIS as it tows the Earth back to place.
The Lyrics:
I don't believe that anybody feels
The way I do about you now
...There are many things that I would
Like to say to you
But I don't know how
The Fic:
He concentrates on Rose because he is even more full of her as a human than he was as a Time Lord. Two hearts’ worth of love crammed into one, entire dictionaries’ worth of words he’d never have said before tumbling over each other on the tip of his tongue, and that’s just the beginning.
The song is basically being sung by a guy about a girl - he's got feelings for her (presumably romantic), but he just can't express them yet. All he knows is that the way he feels - no one else could possibly feel this way.
It's the same with TenII - as Surrexi says, he's got two hearts worth of love shoved into one. Ten might feel the same, but his love is diluted, spread out a little. TenII feels it more acutely. And while he's got the ability to say those three words to Rose - he can't, just yet. They aren't quite formed, but they will be.
And if you still have doubt that the song and the man go together - Noel Gallagher, who wrote the song for Oasis back in 1995, said the following: "It's a song about an imaginary friend who's gonna come and save you from yourself."
Okay, maybe Rose isn't imaginary. But Ten point-blank tells her that she'll save TenII. And TenII knows it.
Surrexi even refers back to this song in a later ficlet, having TenII actually ruminate about how there are so many things he wants to say to her now - almost a direct quote from the song.
I think another of my favorite pairings here is the fifth one - Rob Thomas's Ever the Same, and a ficlet about the Doctor, learning to be comfortable in his own skin, in the new world around him.
The Lyrics:
You were holding to me
Like a someone broken
And I couldn't tell you but I'm telling you now
Just let me hold you while you're falling apart
The Fic:
That night, they fall asleep in each other’s arms in the center of the bed (pyjamas on), soothed into undisturbed slumber by a small machine in the corner. It isn’t perfect, but the low hum it emits is like an aural security blanket, and the Doctor feels at home for the first time in weeks.
What I love about this particular pairing, is that the Doctor is being held in comfort not only by Rose, but by the machine in the corner, giving him the auditory security blanket he needs to feel at home. And again Surrexi will throw back to this song, and this image, by later stating that he no longer needs the security blanket of the machine to sleep - Rose is not only enough, but she's become home for him, just as he was always (ever) home for her.
But I think the best pairing of all is the next to last:
The Lyrics:
We'll lock the world outside
Embrace the gift of time
Promising forever
Knowing that this moment
Might be all we ever find
The Fic:
He can still feel it passing, every second whipping down his neurons, months going by like seconds used to pass before. He used to be a lord of Time, but he thinks he never understood its true value until he stopped being a lord of anything.
At the end of the day, it's about the passage of time. In every TenII fic, the very fact that he is mortal, that he is slowly slipping toward the inevitable death that awaits him - this is examined, and studied, and set aside.
The passage of time, however, isn't just about the Doctor - it's about everything, and everyone around him. It's about the progression of things, how every moment of your life you're building upon the first. It's a little like a song, actually - a few notes, a few instruments, before adding a few more, blossoming into something deeper and richer than you might have imagined in those first few bars. A song tells a story. A story, properly told, is musical. They go hand in hand, really.
Clever of Surrexi to realize that.
In short, vote for Ever the Same. It's an amazing amount of research, time, effort, and talent on several levels. It's an entire package that will bring tears to your eyes and a lump to your throat. It's something you'll remember long after the songs have played out, and as such, it's absolutely deserving of your vote.
*
Hiding in Plain Sight by Gillian Taylor aka dark_aegis
Category: Nine/Rose
Characters: Rose, Alt!Nine, Alt!Donna, Mickey
Rating: Teen
Details: Five chapters, AU post-Doomsday, but elements of Human Nature. Anything else gives it away.
Why It Rocks:
The thing about grief - it doesn't exactly fade. But the details that make it stronger, that give grief its sharp edges, those fade. They say that grief becomes easier to bear after a while - I don't think that's quite so, because as those details become fuzzy, grief takes on a whole different meaning.
Rose, stuck in the parallel world, wanting nothing more to return and find her Doctor, knows about the details fading away.
Used to be that all she had to do was close her eyes and ask herself what would the Doctor say about this or that and she’d be able to hear his voice. Not any more. The ideas are there. A bit of his babbling, too. But not his accent. Estuary, wasn’t it?
But there's this as well: for all that Rose misses her Doctor - there's the indisputable fact that he sent her away - not once, but twice. Every time her Doctor left her (either through regeneration or the Void), it was shortly after he'd tried to send her away. It's not the mangled goodbye on the beach that Rose remembers. It's the actions of three months before that she can't shake - it's the knowledge that somewhere, he continues on, without her.
Besides, does he really want her back? She doesn't doubt he misses her. But he said it, didn't he? The whole wither and die conversation after Sarah Jane. And if he does leave her behind again, where will she go? Her mum won't leave her dad here. Mickey's not leaving. And in that other universe she'll be completely reliant on him.
And so Rose goes on with her days, working with Torchwood, solving mysteries, chasing the aliens. She doesn't expect to see the Doctor again, of course - and this fact, more than any other, is what gives her the most despair. So when she does see a familiar face - that of the blue eyes, and large ears, set above a leather jacket - Rose can't help but shake the idea that it's him.
(It doesn't hurt that he's rescuing her, either, from an alien force. That's kind of the way it goes between them, after all.)
We learn that this man, however, isn't quite Rose's Doctor. He's familiar to us, yes, both in mannerisms and facial features, but the details of his life are different. He's got a sister named Donna, a job as a DI, a generic name of John Smith...and a fobwatch with a circular design. Yes, friends, it's Alt!Nine with a fobwatch. But the story isn't so much about Nine and the "to open or not to open" debate. This story is about Rose, and her own debate, which John catches all too well. With the aliens at the door, and doom and destruction looming, Rose asks him to open the watch, to bring back the Doctor, even if it means his own death.
John, however - who has been somehow, strangely fascinated by Rose all this time, all along noting that there's something not quite right about her presence - John realizes something about Rose's request.
"We need you," Rose says.
"We?" he echoes, almost scoffing. "Or jus' you?"
Does Rose ask on behalf of the Earth? Or does she ask for her own interests? She hasn't been chasing the Doctor, not explicitly in the story. But she has gone to him, she's questioned him, she's told him that she knows who he is. To him, she must sound crazy - or frighteningly familiar.
And John, too, finds himself inexplicably drawn to this girl. One has to wonder if he wouldn't open the watch if she asked and the fate of the Earth wasn't at stake.
But it is, and he's too much himself, even as a human, to risk it.
There are tears in Rose's voice as she says, "I'll promise to go away an' never try to talk to you again. Just please open that watch."
One has to wonder - does Rose mean it? She's missed her Doctor for so long - and having found John Smith, she didn't rest until she spoke to him. Does she even believe in what she promises? Is that why she's crying, because she knows she'll have to keep that promise?
Or is she crying, because this Doctor isn't her Doctor, and she's hoping she won't have to?
The story does not end with John opening the watch - because that's not the point of the story. It's not the Doctor hiding in plain sight - it's Rose. Living her life, hardly quiet, working with the one organization whose sole existance was due to the one man she hoped to find again.
You see, Rose was left in the parallel world knowing two things: the first, that Torchwood was created by the Doctor himself. And the second - the Doctor doesn't always know everything. He said, yes, that there was only one of him.
But then how are there two Torchwoods?
She's going to be okay. She doesn't have to spend her life looking around corners, hoping against hope that her Doctor's done the impossible again and come for her. She doesn't have to work on dimension cannons or try to find different routes back to her old universe. She can't let that define her life. So she won't. Because now she knows she's not really all alone in this universe, playing the Doctor.
The Doctor is here. And that's absolutely brilliant.
In short, vote for Hiding in Plain Sight. It's a fun look at Human Nature and human nature both; it's got Donna and Mickey and an extremely uncomfortable conversation over coffee. It's affirming and sweet, and you will end with a smile on your face, and it's entirely deserving of your vote.
*
Precious Little Space Dumplings of Love by shaggydogstail
Category: Ten/Master
Characters: Ten, the Master
Rating: NC-17
Details: One-shot, post-LoTL AU where the Master doesn't die. The first half is crack, the second is slash.
Why it Rocks:
Perhaps the Master puts it best: It’s a shame to waste how cute we both are this time around. And there's always been something inherently slashy about the way the Doctor and the Master interacted. The Doctor, who had so much trust and hope in the Master, convinced that the man could be good...and the Master, so doggedly determined to prove him wrong.
Totally like a friendship gone horribly, horribly wrong.
Plus, you know, there's a long tradition of fanfic being inherently slashy anyway. (No, seriously, that's a Wikipedia entry on the history of slash in fanfic. I KID YOU NOT.)
But this particular slash story regarding the Doctor and the Master is noteworthy for one main reason: It's Just Plain Funny.
Putting up with the Doctor’s unnatural levels of sanctimony would drive a lesser Time Lord to distraction. But that’s not the worst of it.
The worst part is that he’s so bloody bored.
It's not that the Master actually wants to have sex - although he certainly wouldn't mind. It's that he's just bored. He's trapped on the TARDIS, he's tired of mutiny (which doesn't work anyway), he really doesn't want to hear the Doctor babble at him - so what's left, but trying to shock the Doctor. And the best way to shock our mostly asexual Doctor is by talking about sex.
For the most part, it works. Except the Doctor doesn't really take the Master seriously. For one thing, the Doctor can't actually believe that the Master really wants to have sex. For another, as the Master correctly assumes - there's the guilt-factor.
'Are you worried that it might be unethical to sleep with me while I am, technically, your prisoner, hm? Because, really, I don’t think you need to concern yourself with that. Once you’ve got a couple of genocides under your belt a spot of sexual impropriety is neither here nor there.’
One of the clever things that Shaggy's done here is to reverse the roles a little bit. The story is told from the Master's POV, which really suits a crack!fic extremely well. It also turns the tables just a bit - we see the Doctor not as the long-suffering Time Lord, but as the slightly sanctimonious know-it-all.
The Doctor looked up from the Secret Project he was working on (another bone of contention - the bastard was clearly Up To Something, but the Master didn’t like to give him the satisfaction of asking) and gave him one of his tediously patient looks.
The Doctor is the slightly nefarious one - we're almost on the Master's side here. How dare the Doctor keep our poor bored Master out of the loop!
So really, the only way to actually get these two to do anything is to create a catalyst. In the form of the classic shag-or-die scenario - although in this case, it's shag-or-be-locked-away-for-a-few-centuries. Which leads to what has got to be the most hysterical courtroom scene I've ever read. Who knew the Master could ham it up that much? He seems to take even the Doctor by surprise with his carrying-on. And he certainly makes an impression on the authorities:
‘They’re awfully sweet, aren’t they?’ sighed the court clerk.
‘They’re prime candidates for psychiatric screening,’ said the magistrate.
And really, when it's all said and done...and the Master and the Doctor are released into society...there's just one small matter to clear up.
Will they actually do it? And why on earth would they want to?
‘Because once we got back to the TARDIS I’m going to be locked up with you and your endless sanctimonious attempts at salvaging my character for at least a hundred years,’ said the Master. ‘Having the memory of you all desperate and sweating, begging me for more is the only thing that might make the long winter evenings even remotely bearable.’
Well...he does have a point.
In short, vote for Precious Little Space Dumplings of Love. It's got seriously funny banter, Jack Harkness's diary, discussions of what is proper to sell on eBay, and a really interesting set of aliens. It's got fandom cliches turned on their head, an extremely supportive wall, and the Doctor being cuddly. You will never call your loved one "dumpling" again without giggling, and that alone makes this fic deserving of your vote.
*
All of today's reviews were written by azriona.