FIC: The Abolitionist (originalfic/Slave Breakers crossover)
Title: The Abolitionist.
Creator: Dusk Peterson.
Where to find me: Website, e-mail list, Dreamwidth blog, InsaneJournal mirror blog, LiveJournal mirror blog.
Fandom: A crossover between my Turn-of-the-Century Toughs universe and Maculategiraffe's Slave Breakers universe. You don't need to know the fandoms to understand this story.
Pairing: One of my characters/one of Maculategiraffe's characters (and boy, did I have to flip a coin to decide which character to list first). The name of Mac's character is revealed at an appropriate point in the first chapter, but for those of you who can't wait that long for the exact pairing: [Spoiler]Carr/Jesse
Categories: Male/male attraction, male/male platonic feelings, male/female attraction (subplots), and male/female platonic feelings (subplots). Historical fantasy (with a touch of science fiction), class/rank themes, family themes, friendship fiction, master/servant (subplots), references to past master/slave, mentor fiction (subplot), spirituality themes, war fiction (subplot).
Age of Sail era: 1910s, because commercial fishing by sailboat didn't end in the nineteenth century on the Chesapeake Bay. My novel features the shore operations that supported the Bay's fishing boats.
Series: Waterman, a historical fantasy series and retrofuture series inspired by the Chesapeake Bay oyster wars, boarding school rivalries in the 1910s, and 1960s visions of things to come. I've been posting these stories out of order, so this is the first story in the series.
Cautions/rating: Boilerplate cautions for all my stories, with an additional caution for profanity. R (or M by my ratings system in the previous link). Both main characters are over eighteen.
Length: Novel (60,000 words).
Feedback: Yes, please.
Note: With generous permission from Maculategiraffe, this is a DRM-free multiformat e-book (epub, html, mobi/Kindle, pdf, doc). The first couple of scenes can be read free online, or can be downloaded as an e-book sample.
Story summary: When a foul-mouthed, seditious foreigner turns up at your door, what are the benefits of letting him in? So wonders Carr, a young man living in a bayside nation that is troubled by internal battles. In his world, servants fight against masters, tonging watermen fight against dredging watermen, and landsteads eye one another's oyster grounds with greed. It seems to Carr that the only way in which to keep such warfare from entering his own home is to keep very, very quiet about certain aspects of himself which his family would not be able to accept.
But "trouble" is a word that appears to delight the new visitor. He is ready to stir up danger . . . though he may not be as prepared as he thinks to confront what lies within Carr.
The servants were scared stiff of him, and the masters were clearly uncertain what to say to a man who came from such an eccentric House. Nothing was different, nothing had changed. And yet everything had changed since Carr met a young foreigner who showed him not the least bit of respect.