Children of Time Awards, Part Seven
As you know, the Children of Time awards are up for voting. And as there's so many fics up in each category - and only one vote per category, I'm going through the fics in a mad attempt to figure out how on earth I should vote.
I figured my notes might come in handy to the rest of you.
In Part One, I reviewed Chaos Theory, Six Stages, and Not One Line.
In Part Two, I reviewed The Devil You Know, Wolf Moon, Dulce et Decorum Est, and Passing Notes.
In Part Three, I reviewed Non-Linear Love Story, And So Things Go, and What Doesn't Kill You.
In Part Four, I reviewed You That Way, We This Way, Human Nature, Teach Me More, Coming Around, and Passing the Torch.
In Part Five, I reviewed I Had No Idea I Had Been Traveling (series), 9.8 Metres Per Second Squared, First and Last, and Tender Moments That Don't Last.
In Part Six, I reviewed 7 Words and a Metaphor, Illyria (series), and The Unsexy Sex.
Today, I'll review:
The Bliss series by Dame_Ruth
The Doctor Got Abducted by elmo_doodle
Ulysses by Rheanna
There is No Peace That I've Found So Far by teenwitch77
Therefore, without further ado:
Why You Should Vote For This Fic:
The Bliss Series by Dame Ruth Link goes to Teaspoon
Characters: Nine, Rose, Jack
Rating: Mostly Teen, one or two parts are Adult
Details: OT3, AU post S1
Why It Rocks:
I don't read a lot of OT3 fic (basically, that's Doctor/Rose/Jack - why it's called OT3, I don't know, and if someone would like to enlighten me, they get a cookie). However, I very much enjoyed the Bliss series - which, let me tell you, is fairly extensive, with lots of one-shots and short chaptered stories. In fact, I'll be honest and say I didn't finish them all, because I wanted to get moving on the reviews, but I fully intend to return and finish them up.
Why? Well, Bliss has differed from the other OT3 stories I've read in a few key ways. One of the first ways is that it's not dark. Most OT3 deals with a certain amount of angst and darkness. But Bliss, by contrast, isn't angsty at all. It's actually fairly bright and cheerful. The relationship that Rose, Jack, and the Doctor form is very much a triad of sorts - each of the three of them lend an important facet to their lives together. In a good OT3 fic, you wonder how on earth anyone could imagine just Rose/Doctor, or Rose/Jack, or Doctor/Jack. Surely the pair would be incomplete without the third. Bliss does exactly that - it makes the three of them together such an obvious thing, that you can't imagine them on their own.
[Between the three of them]...something intangible slipped, slid . . . and snicked cleanly into place, like a well-fitted key turning the tumblers of a lock.
This is all accentuated by another thing that makes Bliss a little bit different. It's a very cliched thing to give Rose and the Doctor an empathic bond of sorts - but here, Jack is included in it. In fact, Jack and Rose form the bond first, although the Doctor sensed it beginning, and once they realized what's happening, draw the Doctor into it.
[Rose wrapped Jack] in a wash of color and feeling. He closed his eyes, exhaling deeply, and Rose followed suit, feeling the resonance between them. But it was still wrong, still incomplete . . . still missing a vital piece.
It's this bond that forces them to choose to become a threesome - or split up for good. This would probably be the darkest, most tense moment of the series so far as I've read: because while Rose and Jack want the bond, even if they don't understand it, the Doctor resists. And here enters the brief darkness, when the Doctor tries to frighten them off. Naturally, he doesn't succeed, because Rose knows him too well:
The Storm above them was him, and it was genuine . . . but so was this hidden brightness, the self within that spoke directly to her heart.
What's also interesting about Bliss is the innocence about it. Because the story isn't weighted down by darkness, we see the three of them in very clear light. Rose, especially, has always been portrayed as innocent; but here too, Jack is innocent, or at least not as dark as we're used to seeing him. Their innocence compounded in turn gives the Doctor a sort of lightness. The three of them are easy with each other, comfortable with themselves, and this is reflected in the smooth writing and the simple stories. There's no trouble in the Bliss-verse that can't be conquered by the three of them. It's a very happy, cheerful, friendly little world.
And when I say innocent - I do mean innocent. There's surprisngly very little smut here to be found. The relationship between Rose and her men is not about the bedroom - nor was it ever intended to be. The bond wasn't formed while they were naked, it was formed while they went about their daily lives, while they laughed and had adventures and fixed the TARDIS. Bliss isn't about the sex - it's about them. Their love for each other, and their insecurities about themselves, and not the details of their relationship:
...Out of “Time Lord, nine hundred years old, powerful, magnetic, brilliant,” “Former Time Agent, former soldier, conman extraordinare, suave and gorgeous,” and “twenty years old, had one really disastrous relationship and then worked in a shop for a bit,” [Rose] knew which biography didn’t fit.
In short, vote for the Bliss-verse. It's sweet, and sincere, and innocent. It's got clipboards and dancing and Jackie. It's a wonderful world that will keep you entranced for hours, and you'll be sorry when it's time to stop reading. It's a lovely, light-hearted look at a popular threesome, and three times over, it deserves your vote.
*
The Doctor Got Abducted by elmo_doodle Link goes to Teaspoon
Characters: Ten, Rose, OC
Rating: PG
Details: Fairly cracky, 10 chapters (finished), baby!fic of a different variety
Why It Rocks:
There is ridiculous, and then there is ridiculous. This is one of the two, and I can't decide which. Really, whichever ridiculous it is, I have to say this for it: it's fun.
Basically, the Doctor is abducted by aliens. Or so he claims.
“Doctor,” Rose said, looking at him as if he were crazy, “you are an alien!”
The Doctor gave her a look. “I know that! But when I got up in to the spaceship-”
“Oh, god, there was a spaceship,” Rose muttered, closing her eyes and placing her head in her hands-
It just gets worse from there. Don't read this and expect angst, or inner turmoil, or long drawn-out conversations about the relative sanity of the main characters. And really, there isn't much time, because you know what happens when one's abducted by aliens, right?
“I think...I’m about to...give birth,” [the Doctor] said in gasps.
“Oh god...HOW?!” Rose cried out in panic.
“I DON’T KNOW!!” the Doctor cried back.
What follows is a baby!fic not quite like any other you've ever seen. First of all, the baby in question is green. Second, the baby isn't Rose's - in fact, he's all Doctor (apart from the green). It's not often we get to see the baby first and the pairing second. And really, the pairing takes backstage here: the Doctor and Rose are raising a baby, sure, but really, it's more about watching the Doctor interact with his son.
I think the reason we write baby!fic is because we don't like the idea of the Doctor being the last. It's not about being alone in the universe (although that's part of it, too). If it was about being alone, we'd be reversing the Time War. No, the act of giving him children is two-fold. Th first, of course, is that children is a natural outcome when two people love each other. (In most cases, that would be the Doctor and Rose.) We pair them off, we get them pregnant, baby!fic follows.
What makes this fic different from other baby!fics is that this prompt is removed immediately. The Doctor is given a baby absolutely independently of Rose, which allows us to concentrate on the other reason for baby!fic: the act of giving the Doctor kids is partially because we want him to really be eternal. We don't like thinking of him as the Last. We want him to go on.
We also want to watch him with babies - because the Doctor, especially Ten, is essentially a large child himself. And big kids, when paired with little kids, generally produce hysterically funny results.
They stared at the plate of dried squid for several long minutes.
Alex looked up at his father. “I dare you to lick it.”
As the story goes, however, we leave the original crack!fic roots behind, and the Doctor slowly starts to realize just how instrumental Rose really is, if not to the creation of his son, but to the raising of him. And, of course, it ends as all baby!fic should - with a mom, and a dad, and a kid, in the TARDIS.
In short, vote for The Doctor Got Abducted. It's quick and sweet and funny and about twenty kinds of ridiculous. It takes the baby!fic and turns it in its ear. It isn't meant to be taken seriously, and it isn't meant to change the world of baby!fic, but it is worth your vote.
*
Ulysses by Rheanna Link goes to Teaspoon
Characters: John Smith, Joan Redfern, the Doctor, Martha Jones
Rating: Teen
Details: AU after Human Nature/Family of Blood. Kind of twisty in a Timey-Whimey way. One-shot.
Why It Rocks:
Human Nature AUs are a dime a dozen.
This odd little tale is one-of-a-kind.
"The Doctor is here," Joan says, and at first John thinks she's talking about that pleasant young man from the surgery who calls in every other day to take his blood pressure and give him more pills.
But Joan isn't - she's talking about The Doctor, of course, but not as we know him. You see, something else happened on that night in 1913. It wasn't John Smith who opened the pocketwatch, and took in all the memories and abilities of a Time Lord.
It was Martha Jones.
The light is pouring out of it and into her, filling her up to the brim and beyond, burning away whatever was there before and replacing it with something else. She is screaming and screaming and screaming and John hates himself because mingled in with his horror is a kind of relief that now it won't have to be him.
Now, forty years later, John Smith is dying, and the Doctor - once himself, once his former companion, now something entirely new, has come to visit and pay her respects. And perhaps, to answer and ask a question or two.
John says, "That's why you came, isn't it? I'm a part of you that got amputated, cut off from the rest, and I did something you never could. Something you can't even understand. And you can't stand the idea of not knowing."
"You began as a story I told," the Doctor says. "I think I have the right to know how it ends."
On the surface, it's a story about stories. The story of Martha Jones effectively ended that night in 1913, when Martha Jones became the Doctor. The story of John Smith, however, became real. We have no concept of how long it's been for this new, not-Martha Doctor, but there's the impression she traveled a bit before visiting John again. Stranger, she moves and speaks like the Doctor we knew - she rambles and babbles and is cheerful and friendly. She dives into things without preamble and instantly moves from delighted to serious in a single blink.
She talks on, and it's like listening to a story -- an incredible fireside tale that begins with taking tea with Tennyson and ends with sharing in a meal of roasted suckling pig with an ancient Ithican king, lost on his way home from the siege of Troy. It's the kind of story she belongs in, John thinks: like Odysseus, the Doctor is more myth than flesh-and-blood.
The Doctor's story never ends - it's ongoing, and John, seeing a familiar body with a once familiar life before him, is only too aware that his story - an off-shoot of the original - is about to end.
But more so than that, it's a story about regret, and lack thereof. In the forty years since John became himself, he's had to live with that moment, when Martha became the Doctor, and he remained himself. That he willingly left his own story to another - or perhaps had it taken away from him - is something he's had to battle every day since it happened. And every day, he's had to face the impossible What If that is surely on the top of his mind. Did he choose the slow path himself - or did Martha choose it for him?
We don't really get an answer to that - it's probably something that none of them can possibly know. Because it's not just the Doctor and John Smith in the room together - it's Martha, too, even though she's been altered. It wasn't just John Smith who gave up being the Doctor to be himself. Martha Jones gave up herself, in order to become the Doctor. It's not only John who wonders if such a thing was the right thing to do.
"Is it enough," asks the Doctor, again and again. Is what they gave up worth what they received?
John: "I'm not like you. All I knew was that I could lose so much, and that I was powerless. Helpless. That's how it is for us human beings, Doctor. And if you want to know if what I had was enough? There's your answer. It was everything."
And the Doctor?
The myth of the Doctor had to survive. A sacrifice was required. Martha Jones made it, and in doing so became a myth herself.
In short, vote for Ulysses. It's twisty and lovely and deep and poetic. It's an odd look at a complex moment. It's something you'll want to read two or three times over, and still not quite know how you feel in the end. It'll stay on your mind long after you finish it, and has questions and answers and Tennyson for good measure. It's a lovely look at human frailty and the power of myth, and it absolutely deserves your vote.
*
There Is No Peace That I've Found So Far by teenwitch77
Characters: Ten, Rose
Rating: R (sex)
Details: One-shot, post-Stolen Earth/pre-Journey's End
Why It Rocks:
There was such a rush of fic, in those last few weeks of S4 airing, that I'm sure there are plenty of good fics that were somehow lost in the flood. This is one of them.
It's a bit hard to remember, I think, what that middle week felt like. (You know the one - between The Stolen Earth and Journey's End, when we were all in a tizzy because OMGTHEDOCTORISREGENERATING and OMGROSEISBACKANDTHEDOCTORISREGENERATING and we hadn't even gotten so much as a HUG. (Do you think, if RTD had passed a pack of rabid fangirls on the street that week, he would have made it out alive?)
As a whole, we must have produced a bunch of seriously angsty fanfic that week.
But not Teenwitch. No, she kept a sensible head - and thank goodness for that, because her sensible head churned out a truly lovely piece of fanfic. What's more, it's fanfic you can still consider canon (and we all know that's my favorite kind!). It's actually kind of amazing to me, that a few days before we knew for sure what would happen in Journey's End - Teenwitch paid attention and told us the following true things: 1. The Doctor wouldn't change. And 2. The Doctor and Rose would end up together, seperated from the others, on the Dalek ship.
I'm not sure what Teenwitch thinks about the upcoming Christmas special, but whatever her theory is, sign me up.
This is a story from Rose's POV, of a few fleeting moments and movements which the Doctor and Rose have together. There is, out of necessity, uncertainty for both of them. Uncertainty in the location of Jack and Donna, and what has happened to them. Uncertainty in what the Daleks have planned for them. But more importantly, uncertainty - however brief - for each other having found themselves again.
Sometimes [Rose] thinks she idealised everything, that her memories slipped into the realm of fairytales and he couldn’t possibly have been as wonderful as she imagined.
There's a sense of waiting extended, of stillness, in the story. There has been a great deal of movement and motion in the time leading up to the story - Rose through time and space by virtue of the Dimension Cannon, the Doctor through his near-regeneration. Even having found each other, they're still waiting, both on the other to say the right thing, and the Daleks to make the next move.
It seems an eternity as they wait there, gazing at one another, considering everything they’ve lost, everything they might yet lose....Time has become so relative over the last few weeks - jumping back and forth through gaps in the universe, struggling to find the right time, the right moment. It feels like she’s been searching for him forever, and suddenly everything has screeched to a halt. Here. With him.
But even in the uncertainty of waiting, there's comfort to be found in each other. Because at the end of the day, the Doctor has Rose beside him again - and vice versa. They draw strength from each other, as they always have, and in strength there is a sort of comfort. (And yes, wiggiemomsi, that kind of comfort too!) Rose might have been uncertain to start with, but by the end, she has no doubt in the Doctor's affections for her. Not when he's looking at her as though in the midst of this horror he has been granted the most invaluable, precious gift. They're each able to restore faith in the other - the Doctor reassuring Rose about Jack and Donna's safety, and Rose reassuring the Doctor that they'll make it out in one piece.
In short, vote for There Is No Peace That I've Found So Far. It's sweet and calming, a lovely respite of peace in the midst of a maelstrom. It's got love and Daleks and conversations and silence, and it's exactly the right sort of angst to make you want more. It absolutely deserves your vote.
*
On to Part Eight, where I review: To An Outsider's Eye, A Thousand Languages, Dancing Bananas, and Autumn Days That Make You Feel Sad.
Part Eight will appear on Saturday sometime; being a weekend edition, hopefully it'll have more included. In the meantime...read, review, enjoy!
I figured my notes might come in handy to the rest of you.
In Part One, I reviewed Chaos Theory, Six Stages, and Not One Line.
In Part Two, I reviewed The Devil You Know, Wolf Moon, Dulce et Decorum Est, and Passing Notes.
In Part Three, I reviewed Non-Linear Love Story, And So Things Go, and What Doesn't Kill You.
In Part Four, I reviewed You That Way, We This Way, Human Nature, Teach Me More, Coming Around, and Passing the Torch.
In Part Five, I reviewed I Had No Idea I Had Been Traveling (series), 9.8 Metres Per Second Squared, First and Last, and Tender Moments That Don't Last.
In Part Six, I reviewed 7 Words and a Metaphor, Illyria (series), and The Unsexy Sex.
Today, I'll review:
The Bliss series by Dame_Ruth
The Doctor Got Abducted by elmo_doodle
Ulysses by Rheanna
There is No Peace That I've Found So Far by teenwitch77
Therefore, without further ado:
Why You Should Vote For This Fic:
The Bliss Series by Dame Ruth Link goes to Teaspoon
Characters: Nine, Rose, Jack
Rating: Mostly Teen, one or two parts are Adult
Details: OT3, AU post S1
Why It Rocks:
I don't read a lot of OT3 fic (basically, that's Doctor/Rose/Jack - why it's called OT3, I don't know, and if someone would like to enlighten me, they get a cookie). However, I very much enjoyed the Bliss series - which, let me tell you, is fairly extensive, with lots of one-shots and short chaptered stories. In fact, I'll be honest and say I didn't finish them all, because I wanted to get moving on the reviews, but I fully intend to return and finish them up.
Why? Well, Bliss has differed from the other OT3 stories I've read in a few key ways. One of the first ways is that it's not dark. Most OT3 deals with a certain amount of angst and darkness. But Bliss, by contrast, isn't angsty at all. It's actually fairly bright and cheerful. The relationship that Rose, Jack, and the Doctor form is very much a triad of sorts - each of the three of them lend an important facet to their lives together. In a good OT3 fic, you wonder how on earth anyone could imagine just Rose/Doctor, or Rose/Jack, or Doctor/Jack. Surely the pair would be incomplete without the third. Bliss does exactly that - it makes the three of them together such an obvious thing, that you can't imagine them on their own.
[Between the three of them]...something intangible slipped, slid . . . and snicked cleanly into place, like a well-fitted key turning the tumblers of a lock.
This is all accentuated by another thing that makes Bliss a little bit different. It's a very cliched thing to give Rose and the Doctor an empathic bond of sorts - but here, Jack is included in it. In fact, Jack and Rose form the bond first, although the Doctor sensed it beginning, and once they realized what's happening, draw the Doctor into it.
[Rose wrapped Jack] in a wash of color and feeling. He closed his eyes, exhaling deeply, and Rose followed suit, feeling the resonance between them. But it was still wrong, still incomplete . . . still missing a vital piece.
It's this bond that forces them to choose to become a threesome - or split up for good. This would probably be the darkest, most tense moment of the series so far as I've read: because while Rose and Jack want the bond, even if they don't understand it, the Doctor resists. And here enters the brief darkness, when the Doctor tries to frighten them off. Naturally, he doesn't succeed, because Rose knows him too well:
The Storm above them was him, and it was genuine . . . but so was this hidden brightness, the self within that spoke directly to her heart.
What's also interesting about Bliss is the innocence about it. Because the story isn't weighted down by darkness, we see the three of them in very clear light. Rose, especially, has always been portrayed as innocent; but here too, Jack is innocent, or at least not as dark as we're used to seeing him. Their innocence compounded in turn gives the Doctor a sort of lightness. The three of them are easy with each other, comfortable with themselves, and this is reflected in the smooth writing and the simple stories. There's no trouble in the Bliss-verse that can't be conquered by the three of them. It's a very happy, cheerful, friendly little world.
And when I say innocent - I do mean innocent. There's surprisngly very little smut here to be found. The relationship between Rose and her men is not about the bedroom - nor was it ever intended to be. The bond wasn't formed while they were naked, it was formed while they went about their daily lives, while they laughed and had adventures and fixed the TARDIS. Bliss isn't about the sex - it's about them. Their love for each other, and their insecurities about themselves, and not the details of their relationship:
...Out of “Time Lord, nine hundred years old, powerful, magnetic, brilliant,” “Former Time Agent, former soldier, conman extraordinare, suave and gorgeous,” and “twenty years old, had one really disastrous relationship and then worked in a shop for a bit,” [Rose] knew which biography didn’t fit.
In short, vote for the Bliss-verse. It's sweet, and sincere, and innocent. It's got clipboards and dancing and Jackie. It's a wonderful world that will keep you entranced for hours, and you'll be sorry when it's time to stop reading. It's a lovely, light-hearted look at a popular threesome, and three times over, it deserves your vote.
*
The Doctor Got Abducted by elmo_doodle Link goes to Teaspoon
Characters: Ten, Rose, OC
Rating: PG
Details: Fairly cracky, 10 chapters (finished), baby!fic of a different variety
Why It Rocks:
There is ridiculous, and then there is ridiculous. This is one of the two, and I can't decide which. Really, whichever ridiculous it is, I have to say this for it: it's fun.
Basically, the Doctor is abducted by aliens. Or so he claims.
“Doctor,” Rose said, looking at him as if he were crazy, “you are an alien!”
The Doctor gave her a look. “I know that! But when I got up in to the spaceship-”
“Oh, god, there was a spaceship,” Rose muttered, closing her eyes and placing her head in her hands-
It just gets worse from there. Don't read this and expect angst, or inner turmoil, or long drawn-out conversations about the relative sanity of the main characters. And really, there isn't much time, because you know what happens when one's abducted by aliens, right?
“I think...I’m about to...give birth,” [the Doctor] said in gasps.
“Oh god...HOW?!” Rose cried out in panic.
“I DON’T KNOW!!” the Doctor cried back.
What follows is a baby!fic not quite like any other you've ever seen. First of all, the baby in question is green. Second, the baby isn't Rose's - in fact, he's all Doctor (apart from the green). It's not often we get to see the baby first and the pairing second. And really, the pairing takes backstage here: the Doctor and Rose are raising a baby, sure, but really, it's more about watching the Doctor interact with his son.
I think the reason we write baby!fic is because we don't like the idea of the Doctor being the last. It's not about being alone in the universe (although that's part of it, too). If it was about being alone, we'd be reversing the Time War. No, the act of giving him children is two-fold. Th first, of course, is that children is a natural outcome when two people love each other. (In most cases, that would be the Doctor and Rose.) We pair them off, we get them pregnant, baby!fic follows.
What makes this fic different from other baby!fics is that this prompt is removed immediately. The Doctor is given a baby absolutely independently of Rose, which allows us to concentrate on the other reason for baby!fic: the act of giving the Doctor kids is partially because we want him to really be eternal. We don't like thinking of him as the Last. We want him to go on.
We also want to watch him with babies - because the Doctor, especially Ten, is essentially a large child himself. And big kids, when paired with little kids, generally produce hysterically funny results.
They stared at the plate of dried squid for several long minutes.
Alex looked up at his father. “I dare you to lick it.”
As the story goes, however, we leave the original crack!fic roots behind, and the Doctor slowly starts to realize just how instrumental Rose really is, if not to the creation of his son, but to the raising of him. And, of course, it ends as all baby!fic should - with a mom, and a dad, and a kid, in the TARDIS.
In short, vote for The Doctor Got Abducted. It's quick and sweet and funny and about twenty kinds of ridiculous. It takes the baby!fic and turns it in its ear. It isn't meant to be taken seriously, and it isn't meant to change the world of baby!fic, but it is worth your vote.
*
Ulysses by Rheanna Link goes to Teaspoon
Characters: John Smith, Joan Redfern, the Doctor, Martha Jones
Rating: Teen
Details: AU after Human Nature/Family of Blood. Kind of twisty in a Timey-Whimey way. One-shot.
Why It Rocks:
Human Nature AUs are a dime a dozen.
This odd little tale is one-of-a-kind.
"The Doctor is here," Joan says, and at first John thinks she's talking about that pleasant young man from the surgery who calls in every other day to take his blood pressure and give him more pills.
But Joan isn't - she's talking about The Doctor, of course, but not as we know him. You see, something else happened on that night in 1913. It wasn't John Smith who opened the pocketwatch, and took in all the memories and abilities of a Time Lord.
It was Martha Jones.
The light is pouring out of it and into her, filling her up to the brim and beyond, burning away whatever was there before and replacing it with something else. She is screaming and screaming and screaming and John hates himself because mingled in with his horror is a kind of relief that now it won't have to be him.
Now, forty years later, John Smith is dying, and the Doctor - once himself, once his former companion, now something entirely new, has come to visit and pay her respects. And perhaps, to answer and ask a question or two.
John says, "That's why you came, isn't it? I'm a part of you that got amputated, cut off from the rest, and I did something you never could. Something you can't even understand. And you can't stand the idea of not knowing."
"You began as a story I told," the Doctor says. "I think I have the right to know how it ends."
On the surface, it's a story about stories. The story of Martha Jones effectively ended that night in 1913, when Martha Jones became the Doctor. The story of John Smith, however, became real. We have no concept of how long it's been for this new, not-Martha Doctor, but there's the impression she traveled a bit before visiting John again. Stranger, she moves and speaks like the Doctor we knew - she rambles and babbles and is cheerful and friendly. She dives into things without preamble and instantly moves from delighted to serious in a single blink.
She talks on, and it's like listening to a story -- an incredible fireside tale that begins with taking tea with Tennyson and ends with sharing in a meal of roasted suckling pig with an ancient Ithican king, lost on his way home from the siege of Troy. It's the kind of story she belongs in, John thinks: like Odysseus, the Doctor is more myth than flesh-and-blood.
The Doctor's story never ends - it's ongoing, and John, seeing a familiar body with a once familiar life before him, is only too aware that his story - an off-shoot of the original - is about to end.
But more so than that, it's a story about regret, and lack thereof. In the forty years since John became himself, he's had to live with that moment, when Martha became the Doctor, and he remained himself. That he willingly left his own story to another - or perhaps had it taken away from him - is something he's had to battle every day since it happened. And every day, he's had to face the impossible What If that is surely on the top of his mind. Did he choose the slow path himself - or did Martha choose it for him?
We don't really get an answer to that - it's probably something that none of them can possibly know. Because it's not just the Doctor and John Smith in the room together - it's Martha, too, even though she's been altered. It wasn't just John Smith who gave up being the Doctor to be himself. Martha Jones gave up herself, in order to become the Doctor. It's not only John who wonders if such a thing was the right thing to do.
"Is it enough," asks the Doctor, again and again. Is what they gave up worth what they received?
John: "I'm not like you. All I knew was that I could lose so much, and that I was powerless. Helpless. That's how it is for us human beings, Doctor. And if you want to know if what I had was enough? There's your answer. It was everything."
And the Doctor?
The myth of the Doctor had to survive. A sacrifice was required. Martha Jones made it, and in doing so became a myth herself.
In short, vote for Ulysses. It's twisty and lovely and deep and poetic. It's an odd look at a complex moment. It's something you'll want to read two or three times over, and still not quite know how you feel in the end. It'll stay on your mind long after you finish it, and has questions and answers and Tennyson for good measure. It's a lovely look at human frailty and the power of myth, and it absolutely deserves your vote.
*
There Is No Peace That I've Found So Far by teenwitch77
Characters: Ten, Rose
Rating: R (sex)
Details: One-shot, post-Stolen Earth/pre-Journey's End
Why It Rocks:
There was such a rush of fic, in those last few weeks of S4 airing, that I'm sure there are plenty of good fics that were somehow lost in the flood. This is one of them.
It's a bit hard to remember, I think, what that middle week felt like. (You know the one - between The Stolen Earth and Journey's End, when we were all in a tizzy because OMGTHEDOCTORISREGENERATING and OMGROSEISBACKANDTHEDOCTORISREGENERATING and we hadn't even gotten so much as a HUG. (Do you think, if RTD had passed a pack of rabid fangirls on the street that week, he would have made it out alive?)
As a whole, we must have produced a bunch of seriously angsty fanfic that week.
But not Teenwitch. No, she kept a sensible head - and thank goodness for that, because her sensible head churned out a truly lovely piece of fanfic. What's more, it's fanfic you can still consider canon (and we all know that's my favorite kind!). It's actually kind of amazing to me, that a few days before we knew for sure what would happen in Journey's End - Teenwitch paid attention and told us the following true things: 1. The Doctor wouldn't change. And 2. The Doctor and Rose would end up together, seperated from the others, on the Dalek ship.
I'm not sure what Teenwitch thinks about the upcoming Christmas special, but whatever her theory is, sign me up.
This is a story from Rose's POV, of a few fleeting moments and movements which the Doctor and Rose have together. There is, out of necessity, uncertainty for both of them. Uncertainty in the location of Jack and Donna, and what has happened to them. Uncertainty in what the Daleks have planned for them. But more importantly, uncertainty - however brief - for each other having found themselves again.
Sometimes [Rose] thinks she idealised everything, that her memories slipped into the realm of fairytales and he couldn’t possibly have been as wonderful as she imagined.
There's a sense of waiting extended, of stillness, in the story. There has been a great deal of movement and motion in the time leading up to the story - Rose through time and space by virtue of the Dimension Cannon, the Doctor through his near-regeneration. Even having found each other, they're still waiting, both on the other to say the right thing, and the Daleks to make the next move.
It seems an eternity as they wait there, gazing at one another, considering everything they’ve lost, everything they might yet lose....Time has become so relative over the last few weeks - jumping back and forth through gaps in the universe, struggling to find the right time, the right moment. It feels like she’s been searching for him forever, and suddenly everything has screeched to a halt. Here. With him.
But even in the uncertainty of waiting, there's comfort to be found in each other. Because at the end of the day, the Doctor has Rose beside him again - and vice versa. They draw strength from each other, as they always have, and in strength there is a sort of comfort. (And yes, wiggiemomsi, that kind of comfort too!) Rose might have been uncertain to start with, but by the end, she has no doubt in the Doctor's affections for her. Not when he's looking at her as though in the midst of this horror he has been granted the most invaluable, precious gift. They're each able to restore faith in the other - the Doctor reassuring Rose about Jack and Donna's safety, and Rose reassuring the Doctor that they'll make it out in one piece.
In short, vote for There Is No Peace That I've Found So Far. It's sweet and calming, a lovely respite of peace in the midst of a maelstrom. It's got love and Daleks and conversations and silence, and it's exactly the right sort of angst to make you want more. It absolutely deserves your vote.
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On to Part Eight, where I review: To An Outsider's Eye, A Thousand Languages, Dancing Bananas, and Autumn Days That Make You Feel Sad.
Part Eight will appear on Saturday sometime; being a weekend edition, hopefully it'll have more included. In the meantime...read, review, enjoy!