TEAM ANGST: Day 9, "At the Time of Writing"

[sageness]

Title: At the Time of Writing
Author: loneraven
Team: Angst
Prompt: "Like toothpaste and orange juice - two great tastes that don’t go together at all.”
Pairing(s): F/K
Length: 3200 words
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: None
Summary: Twenty-five pieces of documentary evidence, and something else that happened.

Once you've read the story, please take a moment to

Comments

[viciouscats]

Wow. Gorgeous.

[ignazwisdom]

This was wonderful.

[zebra363]

Very interesting!

[troyswann]

Wow, I love the way that this comes together in flashes and angles and gleams from the edges of things. That is so difficult to accomplish and so well done here.

And the premise is so chilling, that notion of Fraser's (mostly)comic "craziness" (which is so often just out-of-contextness) catching him up inside the System where his peculiar context will never make sense to an outsider. There's something Kafka-esque about that, the way the story balances on the sharp blade between the notion that Fraser has gone mad for real on the one side, and the notion that Fraser's reality has been dangerously misconstrued on the other.

Really skillfully done, not least because the distancing effect of the fragments of "evidence" allows the real angst of the thing to bleed through without tipping over into bathos. Really nice.

Most excellent!

By which I mean to say, "Oh Fraser!"

[brynnmck]

Oh my gosh, this is absolutely fantastic. So eerie, and so powerful, with the weight of everything that's not said. I adore Fraser's voice in particular, and I love beyond words the way you include the entire world of the show, Maggie and Vecchio and Frannie and Welsh and Thatcher and Turnbull. It really is like a dark mirror of what we see on the show; I read somewhere that Paul Haggis had envisioned that the show would end with Fraser slowly going mad in Chicago, and while I'm glad that never happened, this seems like a perfect glimpse of what it would have looked like. And yet it's not without humor--Ray's line about how Fraser had torn a page out of a library book and was pretty cut up about it... so much in that line, wry humor and sadness and an enormous well of affection, too.

Of the stories I've read so far, this is one of my favorites. Really unusual, and excellently done.