![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) ivyblossom's Buried is actually the third story in a trilogy which posits a relationship between Edmund and Bacchus, but I read it without reading the former two, and it felt fine to me. It takes place in the ordinary world of England, during The Last Battle when Peter and Edmund search for the rings. Edmund's ambivalence toward Narnia and his own post-Narnian life is intriguing -- there's a lovely sort of disquieting mood pervading the whole story, even though nothing much happens in it.
I think this Edmund is a bit older than I picture him being in TLB (he's only meant to be a year or two older than Eustace, who was still a schoolboy in TLB, right?), but if you can get past that, it works.
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sheldrake's Growing Up is a story for everyone who had issues with C.S. Lewis's treatment of Susan in The Last Battle. Susan and Lucy are sisters -- their wants and desires may be different, they may be strangers to each other in certain respects, but they still share that one common ground. This story understands this, in a way that Lewis's published words apparently didn't. The ending is incredibly poignant.
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It's easy to forget that The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe takes place during World War II and the London Blitz. corbeaun's Memory of Heaven remembers. Neither of Edmund's worlds really exists independent of the other -- the one bleeds into and infects the other, and his actions and their consequences are not so easily shakeable simply because he is living a new life.
The story is very short, more of a vignette really, but it's exactly right, exactly what Edmund must be, given the historical context of the book and what we know of him. Even Lucy is finely drawn, in just the perfect amount of words -- perfectly chosen words. The whole thing is sort of breathtaking.
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Yes, you read the pairing right. Vincent Crabbe/Harry Potter. Trust me. It works. Open up allecto's The Chosen, get over your initial shock about the concept, and keep reading.
This isn't a story about a shock pairing. It's about Vincent Crabbe, and what it means to be a pureblood wizard, the son of a Death Eater, a Slytherin, and finally, what it means to be all of those things while working for the wrong side. This is a minor character brought vividly to life. I love the way the author takes tiny glimpses of things JKR gives us and spins whole customs and histories out of them, while in turn distilling them back into tiny glimpses which make the world utterly real and affecting.
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I don't read a lot of Snape/Harry, and I think I know why now: it's because this pairing needs to be dark for me. I can't see romance for it. I see only pain, death, anger and obsession. And after reading atrata's Nine Adulteries, there's really no way I can deal with any other kind of Snape/Harry now.
This story messed with my head. I mean, seriously. It's intense, it's fucked up, it's not what you think, it needs to be read carefully, multiple times, with all of your attention and everything you know about the series at the ready. And even then, a purely superficial reading will still make you go, "Holy shit, that's completely amazing." Because it is.
Major spoilers for HBP. And did I mention that it's DARK?
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setissma says in her notes to The Bathtub's Archipelago that she's never written Ron before, let alone Harry/Ron. She should do it more often. This is a such a sharp little story, a perfect slice of their relationship as it might look after the war is over, when the boys will likely need some putting back together.
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copperbadge's Reclamation is a fascinating AU about a Tom Riddle who chose a different path. The key here, though, is that he's still Tom Riddle. Excellent characterization all around -- chilling characterization, considering how much is different, and how much is exactly the same.
Note: I've characterized this as gen in the tags, but there is a bit of Remus/Sirius slash.
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snegurochka_lee wrote Five Dead Women for the ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif) femgenficathon. This is for all of those people who say the female characters in the HP-verse aren't interesting or are badly written or whatever lame excuse is the thing du jour. I don't think you can get such a freaking awesome story unless there's something compelling going on with the women in the source material, and this story is about five of them.
In short, it's freaking awesome. Read each section carefully -- it's all one story, and the final one is breathtaking.
(Note: very much post-HBP.)
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doyle_sb4's A Phantom of Clouds is just -- oh, utterly gorgeous. The characterizations are delicate and just right, and the setting is rather original. It's a sort of quiet, thinky, lovely little story, with tantalizing glimpses into plausible personal histories for the three characters.
Note: the pairing implies threesome, but there's the story is not sexually explicit at all.
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taraljc always does really good, ep-like longer stories, no matter what fandom she's writing for. Happily, her current focus is on Doctor Who. Ivory and Horn is a slightly zany planetary adventure, Who-style, with some gentle subtext-made-more-text.
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I love Who fics which play with the fact that the TARDIS is a time machine. More of that, please! gwynnega's City of Loss makes my little geeky romantic heart go pitter-pat.
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Everyone and their mother in the new Doctor Who fandom has read Pulse by casirafics, so I'm just jumping on the bandwagon. It's quite good, though -- a well-written reminder that the Doctor is alien, and that even so, he and Rose still manage to share something.
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I LOVE best friend pairings, and Brian/Michael on Queer As Folk US was what got me into the show to begin with. Then, of course, Brian/Justin ran away with everything. Sure, they were pretty, but there's just something about buddyslash...
Anyway. synchronik, whom I have admired across many fandoms, wrote THE Brian/Michael story when the show ended: Every Time. It's sharp as hell -- Brian FUCKING Kinney leaps right off the screen -- but also quite sad in parts, because it deals with the end of relationships as well as the changing of them.
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So I have a new fannish obsession. (Those who've followed my recs over the years are like, "Yeah, what's new.") That obsession is Doctor Who, the new series.
I still have...issues with NC-17 Whofic, or even outright romantic fic, although I've read and enjoyed fair amount. I think the best stories in the fandom are those like loneraven's Lovers, 'Tis Almost Fairy-Time, which is much more about the wonders of the Doctor's intellect and experience of the universe than his sexual prowess. It's also really well-written, and captures a sort of quiet and awed mood while at the same time feeling very much like the inside of Rose's head.
(Now, I went hunting and hunting for this story, to the exclusion of a ton of other Whofics I could have spent the time recommending, because I cleverly neglected to memory it when I first found it. So you know it has to be good, if I went to all that trouble.)
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One of my favorite Hermione characterizations in fanfic is arsenicjade's Care of Magical Creatures. I've been meaning to recommend it for forever, but I think I just needed to dwell on it for a while. It's one of those.
Anyway, it's a novel-length, and it's all about personal recovery from the trauma of war, within the context of post-war reconstruction of wizarding society and prejudices -- specifically, hatred of werewolves. There are certain emotional moments in the story which just made me sort of catch my breath in amazement. If you can get past certain Americanisms and some odd stylistic stuff, it's pretty fantastic.
The pairing is Hermione/Remus/Severus (but takes a long and thoroughly decent while to build to it), with Hermione/Ron/Harry in the past. Life has not been kind to these characters. They really broke my heart.
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I actually finished reading theatresm's Chaos is Come Again (Snape/Hermione) a while ago, but it took me a long time to get there and then I didn't actually like the end result -- but mostly because I was expecting it to go the way of most Snape/Hermiones. So I debated recommending it. But upon further reflection, I've rec'd plenty of stories I didn't like 100%, and this one has so much more to offer than most.
First of all, it's NOT a romance. Fancy that. Second, it's clearly written by someone with a brain. Fancy THAT. It's incredibly in-character (even post HBP, this is not a nice Snape, not at all) intelligently written, intriguingly political. It's set post-war, and it doubles as an impressive commentary on the state of the wizarding world, extrapolating brilliantly from the little bits JKR's dropped about Muggle/Muggle-born prejudices.
But the really cool thing about the story (and actually why it took me so long to finish) is that it was first posted entirely in the author's LJ as a work-in-progress, and as such every installment has comments from a regular round of readers. These comments, in their own way, are just as fascinating as the story itself. People freely discuss the Snape/Hermione characterizations, the implications of the plot, their own interpretations of canon and how the author's interpretation compares, and the author responds and sometimes argues back and it's just this crazy cool synthesis of author and reader and storyteller and audience. After each chapter I found myself spending just as much time reading the subsequent discussion, and wanting to log all the posts in my LJ memories because they're like mini-conferences on a myriad of issues in HP. I loved the chatty sort of storyteller-audience feel to it -- and the explanatory footnotes provided by the author for each chapter. Definitely a fun and absorbing way to read a fic.
Of course, if you don't want all of that, you can read the clean version here. Note that this page also includes a bonus end chapter which I don't think is in the LJ version.
And now that this rec is nearly as long as the story itself, I will move on...
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Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Poet by ladysisyphus and rahaeli.
Is this even fanfic? It's HBP done to the tune of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land. Actually, it IS The Waste Land, only set at Hogwarts. Actually, stop reading my attempt at description and just click on the link. Because whether it's fanfic or not, it is ABSOLUTELY BRILLIANT. Hilarious and chilling by turns.
Did I mention BRILLIANT?
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T.S. Eliot seems to be making the rounds of fandom. In a Handful of Dust by yhlee is weird, poetic, desperate, and dark. I think I'm a bit out of touch with the strangeness of the Angel-verse, but this is evocative and sad yet hopeful, and it's an interesting ending to attach to the one we got.
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There's a sort of house style in BSG fanfic already, all present tense minimalism with certain lines (over-)calculated for dramatic punch, and it doesn't always work for me. But svilleficrecs makes it work in Intra, which fills in some backstory for "33." The prose is unadorned, a bit rough at times, but the story takes a good long look at the characters and their memories of the time before in the midst of the hell they're currently going through.
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penknife's Ordinary Days is a quiet but strong little story in which Hermione takes it upon herself to learn something new about Ron. It's pretty much a slice of perfection. Set post-Half-Blood Prince.
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