Calufrax

Greetings, fellow fanfic aficionados (try saying that three times, fast) - I will be doing my best this week to meet all your reccing needs. Let us kick off with something that I personally find to be right up my fan-fictional street:

Story: Cheer Up, Emo Time Moppet
Author: LizBee
Rating: All Ages
Word Count: 7,504
Author's Summary: The Doctor and Romana's secret alien lovechild learns some hard truths about life.
Characters/Pairings: The Doctor (10th)/Romana II, Rose Tyler, Sarah Jane Smith
Warnings: None

Recced because: Well, if any of you are at all familiar with my previous reccage or indeed output in Whofic, that little "/" between the "The Doctor (10th)" and "Romana II" may strike you as a significant clue. I think it's debatable whether or not somehow bringing Romana back from E-Space/the dead and having her interact with the new series Doctors and their companions would actually be a good idea on TV for a variety of reasons; it can, however, work very well indeed in fic, and this is a very good example. Here we have Romana returning from her long sojourn with the Exo-Universe...with Livia, her and the Doctor's by-now adolescent daughter, in tow. Yes, I'll leave you to digest that idea and imagine exactly how it might play out when Ten (of all Doctors) and his modern-day associates are confronted with this state of affairs, and then gently suggest that you rush over to the Teaspoon and see that whatever you imagined, it wasn't as funny, as well-thought out or as true to the various characters as this story.

I can never get enough of Doctor/Romana, personally, but this isn't the only thing, or even the main thing, going on in this story. Ten and Rose are probably never going to be in my list of favourite Doctor-companion teams, but their interaction here is very well portrayed in a way I wish the TV stories had managed more often. Sarah Jane is very well done too, and K-9 (both of him) is...well, K-9. Above all, young Livia's self-centred teenage point-of-view which continually misses the nuances of the relationships between the other characters (as we are prone to do at that time of life) is a hoot.

This author is no stranger to these pages, but anybody's who's read any of her works will know there's a reason for that. I first read this one a good two or three years ago, or maybe longer, at I think the recommendation of a Livejournal associate, and I'm somewhat shocked to see that I never left a review on it, because it's something I've gone back to more than once and always thought fondly of in between times. Indeed, rereading it before posting this, I was struck by how many of its ideas I must have taken on board and how they have clearly influenced my own efforts to write new series Doctor/Romana fic. Fellow Calufraxers, I urge you, don't be the discourteous fool I was - when you read this (as I'm assuming you will), please leave a small indication of your appreciation for the author.