Calufrax

I thought I'd do a couple of slightly longer recs to finish off, for leisurely weekend reading. Here's the first:

Story: Five Times Liz Shaw and the Brigadier Saved the World
Author: vvj5/lost_spook
Rating: All Ages
Word count: 5592
Author's summary: Season 7 without the Doctor. Surprisingly, the world doesn't end.
Characters/Pairings: Liz/Brig
Warnings: None

Recced because: This is a glorious AU, little snapshots of what might have happened if the Doctor hadn't turned up in Spearhead. Things don't change that much, but everything's that little bit more difficult and hard-won without him around (well, except in the case of Inferno, which becomes somewhat simpler!), but in the process Liz and the Brigadier become closer than they did in canon. The characterisation's done with a wonderful light touch even amongst the occasional grimness; take this exchange, for instance:

"If you need help, you may have as many of my men as you need -."

"I don’t need anyone to clutter up the room and break things, but when I do, I shall be sure to take you up on the offer."

What I find particularly interesting is the way lost_spook deals with the fall out of not having the Doctor present (you can see some of it in the quote, with Liz's attitude to the idea of helpers rather similar to the Doctor's initial attitude to her, but the most interesting one to me is the discussion at the end of the second chapter, which acts as a distorted mirror of the Doctor and Brig's falling out in the Silurians, but surprisingly it's the Brig whose arguments are closest to the Doctor's in the original version, because of the different experiences he has; it's a great bit of characterisation that undercuts a lot of fannish clichés).

Story: When the Lights Fade
Author: wiccagirl24
Rating: All Ages
Word count: 1329
Author's summary: There is a price to be paid for being the Rebel Queen and standing against a tyrant. post ep for the BFA "Live 34".
Characters/Pairings: Ace, Hex, Seven
Warnings: references to torture

Recced because: The author's summary describing this as a post-ep for "Live 34" (one of my favourite BFs, for the way it plays with the medium, but that's beside the point); it's a wonderful examination of this Team TARDIS and what they're willing to sacrifice for the greater good, and the different ways they look after each other in the aftermath. I'm particularly in love with what the Doctor does at the very end.

Story: A Love for the Ages
Author: settiai
Rating: All Ages
Word count: 537
Author's summary: It was a story older than history.
Characters/Pairings: Myfanwy/TARDIS

Recced because: It really shouldn't be possible for a Myfanwy-POV fic to be this good, but this is brilliant. It sounds cracky (and the concept inevitably is) but the telling of the story plays itself straight and is actually rather heartbreaking. And as a bonus, it explains very neatly how Myfanwy ended up in the present day. Lovely stuff.

Title: Mistakes
Author: amaresu
Rating: All Ages
Word count: 588
Author's summary: Her first mistake was accepting a ride from Iris.
Characters/Pairings: Ace, Iris Wildthyme
Warnings: None

Recced because: How can you resist a summary line (that's also the first line of the fic) like that? Iris is always a joy, and putting her together with Ace works very nicely for this little vignette. There's even a nice bit of offstage-Brax in there.

Story: Flowers on Traken
Author: tromana
Rating: All Ages
Word count: 668
Author's Summary: Nyssa doesn’t like to remember; the scars can be too much to bear.
Characters/Pairings: Nyssa, Five
Warnings: none

Recced because: This is a beautiful examination of the angstiness in Nyssa's background that's often understated in canon, but with a nice note of optimism at the end.

Story: Making an Impression
Author: Rutan
Rating: Teen
Word count: 1540
Author's summary:
Characters/Pairings: Three/Liz, Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart
Warnings: BDSM, Non-con

Recced because: I don't buy the Doctor (even the supposedly authoritarian Three) as a top, particularly, but this fic sells it, particularly in the sexist milieu of the era when the show was made (other shows at the time were much, much worse than Who in this respect, though the fact that canon doesn't contain fail such as "Two spanks Zoe out of being a feminist after they restore a planet ruled by women to the Right Way of Doing Things" seems to me to have been more luck than judgement). But more than that it sells Liz's deliciously complicated response to the situation.

(Sorry for the slightly delayed start in reccing! I've picked out seven stories for this week, one each from the era of each old school Doctor. Since I'm late in starting, I'll do two a day on the weekend to catch up.)

Story: Just Another Day
Author: vvj5 (lost_spook)
Rating: All Ages
Word count: 1423
Author's summary: It's business as usual for Ian, Barbara, the Doctor and Vicki. You know, danger, imprisonment, escape...
Characters/Pairings: Ian/Barbara, One, Vicki
Warnings: None

Recced because: The recent tardis_gen ficathon produced loads of great fic, but this is one of my favourites. It works as both a wonderful recreation and a lighthearted deconstruction of its era. The little soupcon of Ian/Barbara shippiness in the mix is wonderful (and doesn't render it non-gen in the slightest IMO, given how present the same sort of thing is in the canon), and somehow it's particularly nice to see Vicki used in a fic like this -- she's not in it much but lost_spook nails her characterisation perfectly, giving the lie to the idea that she's a bit of a cookie cutter Susan replacement.

Story: More Than Just A Cheap Trick
Author: magicallaw
Rating: All Ages
Word count: 1700
Author's summary: When Martha met Donna.
Characters/Pairings: Martha/Donna, Ten
Warnings: none

Recced because: There are probably as many different approaches to the Madonna ship (the only ship with a good smoosh name in any fandom ever, IMO) as there are fics of it, from crack to high emotional drama to smut, but I particularly love this one for its wonderfully complicated knot of time-travel plotting, worthy of a Moffat episode and weaved brilliantly into both characters' journeys in canon.

Story: The Importance of Good Tailoring
Author: glinda_penguin/Glinda
Rating: Teen
Word count: 1000
Author's summary:Fey Truscott-Sade and Izzy Sinclair: Saving the World in Style
Characters/Pairings: Fey Truscott-Sade/Izzy Sinclair
Warnings: None

Recced because: This is a somewhat self-indulgent rec, as it was the fic I received in this year's dw_femslash ficathon. But it deserves a lot more attention than it's had, because it's very very good indeed, and the only reason I can think of for it largely seeming to pass fandom by is that not enough people are into the wonderfulness Doctor Who Magazine comic strip in general, or its awesome canon femslash pairing Fey/Izzy in particular. This fic gets these two companions of the other-other iteration Eighth Doctor just right, and in such a way that it serves perfectly well as an introduction to them (well, OK, it probably helps if you know that Fey is bonded with Shayde, a superpowerful construct from the Matrix, but I've just told you so there you go).

Go. Read. Be converted. Then go out and buy the collections.

Story: Frozen, like me
Author: calapine/Carmen Sandiego
Rating: not given, but I'd say All Ages
Word count: 1600
Author's summary: Take comfort where you can, and wrap up warm in winter.
Characters/Pairings: Nyssa/Tegan, Five
Warnings: None

Recced because: Because they're my OTP, dammit, and they're captured perfectly here. The story evokes its harsh wintry setting perfectly, setting up a fantastic contrast with the warmth they provide one another, and the different ways it expresses itself given their different but complementary personalities. Fabulous.

Well, it's been fun reccing for you all; to finish off, here's some kinky porn from the most recent series, to balance out Friday's 1964-tinged take on the same thing.

Story: Routine
Author: cannibalcake
Rating: Adult
Word Count: 2000
Author's Summary: Ten/Donna. PWP with bondage and fluff.
Characters/Pairings: Ten/Donna
Warnings: BDSM, Explicit Sex, Swearing

Recced because: not only is it a deliciously hot piece of bondage porn for one of the hottest couples on the show, but it also does an excellent job of portraying it as part of a loving, trusting relationship and putting it in an overall context of negotiation and consent, which frankly we need more of in our bondage porn. And it's all fantastically in character.

( NSFW extract )

And yet another inadvertently matching rec:

Story: Watching from the Wardrobe
Author: yesjamie [*]
Rating: Adult
Word Count: 700
Author's Summary: Susan's curious. She watches.
Characters/Pairings: Ian/Barbara, Susan
Warnings: Explicit Sex (and, specifically, voyeurism)

Recced because: I wanted to rec something from the kink meme in my week, and this is a fabulous story, which captures the feel of the Hartnell era despite being porn, and has an interesting take on Time Lord sex in there as well.

[*] yesjamie is (apparently) a collective of kink meme anons (but for all we know it may just be one prolific one!) posting to the Teaspoon from a shared account; I'd just like to point out that they're completely unofficial - I don't know their password and I don't want to.

Story: Remnants
Author: katuah
Rating: All Ages
Word count: 2200
Author's Summary: What does the Doctor do when his current Companions are asleep? How does he explain his life to them? Does he think often about the ones who were with him before? What about the things they leave behind in his TARDIS - or in his heart?
Characters/Pairings: Leela, K9, Four/SJS
Warnings: None

Recced because: Leela as a character, and Four/Sarah Jane as a ship, don't get enough attention in my opinion, but here they're both done very well indeed (in particular, Leela's background is used very well, without demeaning her, and the treatment of the ship strikes me as perfect for all Doctor/human stuff). And it makes good use of the TARDIS, which always gets two thumbs up from me.

Story: The World That Jack Built
Author: I Inayat
Rating: All Ages
Word Count: 1500
Author's Summary: This is the way the world ends.
Characters/Pairings: Anji Kapoor, Faction Paradox, Fitz Kreiner, Samantha Jones, Compassion, Charley Pollard, Shayde, Ssard, Stacy Townsend, The TARDIS
Warnings: Torture and character death

Recced because: Primarily, because it's a fabulously well-written story, with prose that's almost terrifying in its sparseness, and a nice sense of doomed inevitability built up through good use of repetition (it's an AU from the end of Neverland, written at the time, where Zagreus wins). On the meta level, I love the way that it takes all the disparate strands of the Eighth Doctor's continuity (the audios, the books, the DWM comics and even the Radio Times strip) and bundles them up into a single coherent thread of narrative, while giving space to each of the companions in ways that make perfect sense (I particularly love Shayde's bit, and the use of the TARDIS is amazing).