Title: Other Plans
Fandom: Stargate Atlantis
Pairing: John Sheppard/Rodney McKay
Genres: AU, Romance, Hurt/Comfort, First Time, Kid!fic
Length: Super Epic (108,691 words)
Warnings: Descriptions of past child abuse, serious injury to a main character
Author on LJ:
dragonlady7Author Website:
bomberqueen17 @ AO3
Author's Summary:
Life's what happens when you make other plans.
Rodney McKay gets back from his unjust Siberia exile and takes a consulting gig that lets him work from home. He picks a random city, gets a cat, and starts cultivating his eccentricity. His upstairs neighbor is an insanely hot guy whose cop uniform either means the obvious, or that his night job is a stripper. Rodney doesn't care which, he's busy becoming the old lady with the twitching lace curtains who watches everything. (And, yeah, thinking about what that strip routine might look like. Are those real handcuffs?)
John Sheppard quit the Air Force in a last-ditch attempt to save his marriage, since there was a kid on the way. It didn't work, and in fact backfired spectacularly, so now he's left with child support payments and a mortgage on a house he doesn't live in (his dad's a dick), an ex-wife who still loves him enough to yank more little bits out of his heart every chance she gets, a kid he gets to see for a few hours every other week, and a job where he gets shot at almost as much as the one he used to love that he quit. (He's a cop. He's okay at it. That's a hard adjustment to make.) But at least his new downstairs neighbor is hilarious.
Review:
I am deeply in love with bomberqueen17's work. I really enjoy how she writes John and Rodney, both as characters and as people in a relationship. Her writing style is engaging, her plots carry momentum and keep the reader interested, and the sex is hot. It's a nice mix of fluff and angst, too. Most of the fic focuses on John and Rodney as their relationship unfolds, as Rodney learns more about John's struggles. John's son has a strong presence in the fic, even when he's not in a scene itself, because John is a devoted father and much of what he does is with Joey in mind. With kid fic, it's always important to me that I actually *like* the child, and Joey is absolutely adorable and I look forward to his appearances.
Other Plans is technically the first fic in a series but the next installment is a work in progress. However, OP ends in a satisfactory place, though the author does make mention of plot arcs that are to be continued in the series. Nothing sticks out in my mind as unresolved in such a way that I want to tear my hair out. As for the warnings, as the author puts it: "There is no non-con or sexual abuse of a minor *in* this story, but there is discussion of it happening to a character in the past."
Other Plans