205: General Joy

[thefourthvine]

This entry is dedicated to Best Beloved, who has dragged me back to my old system for organizing stories to rec. It's very inspiring, and I'm not sure why I've been putting it off for, um, three years or so. (Let this be a lesson to those of you who are likely to engage in a battle of wills with Best Beloved: she is implacable when determined. It is better just to give in now.)

Anyway, there may be some crazy amounts of recommending as we work through the new (old) system. If it reaches spammination levels, that would be Best Beloved's fault. (If you like it, of course, that's totally to her credit.)

Today: gen!

The One with the Best Damn Trial Scene in the History of Creation. Almost No One Makes It Out, by atrata. Iron Man.

When I was going through that phase of role-playing gaming where you have to try every system ever devised, I created several characters using someone or other's superhero system, where you rolled percentile dice (which, for you non-gamers out there, gives you a result from 1 - 100, or rather, from 01 - 00) on a chart to determine your Super Special Powers (mutant or otherwise - things like being really, really smart were on there, too). If you got 00, you got TWO powers.

I love this story, first and foremost, because it makes it very, very clear that Tony Stark rolled 00 on that table. He is not just a mechanical genius; he is also rich. Richness is a superpower all in itself. And if you take that superpower away from him, as atrata does in this story, you end up with a very different person. Richness insulates him from a lot of things: the consequences of his actions, the real world, his inability to deal with people. Richness also gets him lots of things: equipment, security, people to solve his problems, special privileges, and attention. And I just cannot get over how amazing it is that atrata took that away from him and still kept him the Tony Stark we all know and, um, probably feel vaguely conflicted about loving quite so much, because he is, in all honesty, a total asshole.

And I also love Pepper in this story. I simultaneously long for Iron Man fan fiction and avoid reading most of it, and at least half the reason is that I fear for what will happen to Pepper. It's deeply important to me that she remain independent of Tony even as she's managing him, and that she stay competent and smart, and I worry worry worry that in Tony/Pepper stories she will be reduced to helpless weeping. Plus, okay, I admit it; my actual ideal pairing for Tony Stark is some kind of complicated sex machine that he builds himself:

"Pepper! I've perfected my greatest invention, and now I don't need women!"

"Oh, really. Does that include me?"

"Don't be ridiculous. Hey, watch this."

"Oh my god no. I'll be upstairs. If you need me to dial 911, tell Jarvis." And then she calls Rhodey and they bond for a while over the Impossibility of Tony Stark, and I think it is now obvious to everyone that one of the reasons I don't read much Iron Man fan fiction is that I am already writing it in my head.

(And now that I've totally fallen in love with this story, I - well. You all know how Dark Agenda is having the Racebending Revenge Ficathon, right? Where people make a white character not white? I want someone to make Tony Stark's skin much, much darker and see what happens. I cannot even tell you how much I want that.)

The One That Can Double as a Portland Guidebook, If You Ever Find Yourself in Oregon and Wondering What Jim Kirk Would Do. Graduate Vulcan for Fun and Profit, by lazulisong. Star Trek Reboot.

Someone on my friends list (sorry, I can no longer remember who, but if it was you, fess up - it was brown_betty!) was talking a while back about her Secret Smarts kink, about how she loves stories where a character who is, you know, kiiiiiiind of a doof in the canon is revealed to have believable hidden skills or competence or brains. And I agree with her. It's a rare thing to see it done well, but when it is - oh my god I love it so. And this story is the exemplar of the genre.

For one thing, it is obvious to me that Reboot Kirk must have Secret Smarts. And not because of Pike's whole "genius-level" comment (many is the character I've been told was a genius, and usually I have a hard time believing it), but because I have seen TOS, and I tell you what, Original Kirk is no one's fool. (Okay, he's Spock's, if Spock needs one, because he is whatever Spock needs, but otherwise, no.) So it works for me that Reboot Kirk, in the process of becoming all tarnished and bruised, learned to hide his intelligence.

And I love the background lazulisong gives him here; it adds some complications and depth back to the Misunderstood Hero deal that Abrams went with. I mean, I love a Misunderstood Hero as much as the next girl - which is good, because otherwise I would have to move to a small island without electricity or any kind of communication with the outside world and read nothing but cruise ship brochures - but I love it most when the Misunderstood Hero has some other stuff going on. I like to add a few adjectives to his archetype, is what I guess I'm saying. And this story so perfectly does that, without in any way making him less perfectly Reboot Kirk.

As if all that wasn't enough to make me love this story, there is also an incredible OC in it. He's - he is everything I want in a Vulcan: he's smart, he's tricky, he's so stubborn that redwoods everywhere just give up and move on when faced with him, and he's just barely emotional, just enough to remind us all that Vulcans could be the masters of melodrama if they wanted to be but they choose not to be. (I tell you what, the Federation is lucky there isn't an inhibition-loosening drug that Vulcans use a lot, because it'd be fucking scary: 90% of the time, they're the living definitions of flat affect, but the other 10% of the time, humans everywhere are saying, "Dude, just - just calm down. And please, please, please - stop singing.")

The One That Proves, Once and for All, That John Sheppard Will Not Thank You for Doing Him Any Favors. Earth 2, by Martha Wilson. Stargate: Atlantis.

If there is one thing that we all learned from Gateverse canon (or, okay, that you all learned from the actual canon, and I learned from reading your ep summaries and meta), it's that Pangloss was right, after all: this is the best of all possible worlds. Which, okay, gives me some pause, because - seriously? Especially when you throw in the Goa'uld and all? These are the ideal initial conditions? But apparently there is no change that could possibly improve things. It's all downhill from here. (I am pretty sure that the Gateverse folks did not realize how inherently depressing this is. Try not to think about it, that's my advice.)

In this story, we get to see John Sheppard learn that very thing; he gets to travel to one of those other, less wonderful universes. But not just any of them. (I'm going to try to talk about this without any spoilers, but, seriously, you should just go read the story right now.) And not just any John Sheppard - it's the original, pre-Atlantis John Sheppard, and here is how we know how fucked up John is: Atlantis was actually therapeutic for him. As in, he got more emotionally healthy in an environment of constant stress, danger, and insanity. (I suspect Kate Heightmeyer had an unfinished paper on this very subject, talking about how John and Rodney, pretty much alone in the expedition, somehow got better from it.) As it happens, I have a sneaking fondness for early John Sheppard, so I love this story.

And this story also hits my competence (and smartness!) kink - here we get to see John (plus a couple of other people, naming no names) being surprisingly good at things, given that he is utterly clueless. (Something John should be used to, of course. Good But Clueless is pretty much his middle name.) And also there is a plot, which notice how I am determinedly not spoiling it.

...Actually, I had better shut up about this story right now, while that's still more or less true.

The One in Which We Learn That One of the Major Risks of Time Travel Is That You Might End up Being Schooled by Yourself. Klein Bottle, by basingstoke. Torchwood.

For most fandoms - television fandoms, anyway, and any fandom that has a lot of fan fiction in it - I find, sooner or later, that I've divided the fan fiction into eras, based not on when the story was posted, but when the story is set in the canon. And usually somewhere in there, there's the Nostalgia Point, the setting I miss most once canon (and therefore most stories) has moved past it. I re-read stories in the Nostalgia Point a lot, especially if the canon progresses to the point where I don't want to read new stories in it very much at all.

This story is set squarely in my Torchwood Nostalgia Point. I'm not sure when it is in actual Torchwood canon, since I've never seen any of it and have only a vague sense of the progression of events, but I know what I need the story to be set after. And, definitely definitely, set before. This is a twisty and blissful little story; it's filled with the complications of being Jack Harkness, his emo and his majesty, but it's also in the relatively innocent period of Torchwood, and I love that.

But that is not why I love this story. I love it because it's a time travel story, and time travel has always been one of my biggest narrative kinks, and here it is so very perfectly done. And basingstoke handles one of the difficulties of writing about time travel - if there are multiple versions of character X in the room, but they are from different times and therefore are different people, how do you deal with that? - as well as I've ever seen it done, here. And there has never been a better reason to use second person. (Plus, second person is the only way it's really possible for me to believe what I'm told about Jack's thoughts, because he's so shifty I firmly believe he could lie to an omniscient narrator if he wanted to.)

So: great story, great writing, great nostalgia. I really do not see what you could possibly be waiting for, here.

Comments

[bessemerprocess]

I now desperately want fic in which such a substance hits Vulcan and Starfleet collectively freaks out.

[thefourthvine]

It would be AMAZING. In the Reboot, it would have to be the Enterprise that got a weird distress call from the new Vulcan colony, and they're all, "Oh shit not AGAIN," and they go racing in, and then they wouldn't be able to raise anyone on the planet, and then they'd beam down with Kirk and Spock in the landing party, and -

The colony looked insane. Jim had never actually seen Vulcan architecture in real life, but he'd seen plenty in Old Spock's memories, and they were supposed to be - impressive. And it was possible to see how these could be impressive, but all Jim could see was the graffiti written in three-storey letters on them.

He looked over at his team; Chekov was just staring around with wide eyes, but Uhura was frowning at the graffiti, and even Spock had a tiny line between his eyebrows. "What the hell does that say?"

Uhura said faintly, "Maybe I'm reading this wrong. I hope I'm reading it wrong."

"You are not," Spock told her. "The large red letters suggest that Surak perform a scatological sex act, and the green writing is a heavily modified quote from the Q'tet, indicating that every Vulcan is obliged to -" he broke off. "In all honesty, I am not even certain how to translate that archaic term."

"Party hearty," Uhura said, flatly.

Spock turned to say something to her and stopped, mouth open. That was so weird that it took Jim whole seconds to follow his line of sight. When he did, he couldn't really make anything out, but it was definitely coming towards them. And it was loud. Sounded almost like a mob. He put his hand on his phaser.

"I do not believe they are dangerous. To us," Spock said.

Chekov peered forward. "Are those - ladies?" he asked. "Are they - dancing?"

"Not precisely," Spock said grimly. Jim willed his eyes to focus in the fading Vulcan twilight, and then they were close enough for him to make out - two women, one running towards them, the other following her. Behind them, a whole group of people were following, and they were yelling and cheering. The woman behind threw her body forward and slammed into the running woman, and then they were both screeching and rolling on the ground, yelling in Vulcan.

Uhura said, "Captain, we have to break this up, someone could get hurt."

"Yeah," Jim said. "Spock, you and me -"

"I regret that I cannot," Spock said. He was focused on his tricorder now, his fingers flying over it faster than Jim had ever seen. "There is a 94.5% probability that I will be incapacitated within the next ten minutes. My sensors are picking up an unknown airborne substance, and there is a 69.5% likelihood that this is related to the behaviors we have observed since landing." He paused, then took off his phaser and handed it to Jim. "Please stun me at the first sign of symptoms."

Jim took it a little numbly. Just then, the crowd watching the brawling women started laughing, and Jim turned to check it out. It looked like - wow, it looked like those women had gotten a lot friendlier since he'd last checked, and the one woman was visibly enjoying herself, and he could almost see where the other one's hand was, and -

"Captain," Uhura said tensely. Jim looked over. Chekov was unconscious on the ground, and Spock was gone.

Fuck.

[bessemerprocess]

All I have for this is love and squee. This is awesomesauce!

[macey]

\o/

...I would feel stalkery, but my time-wasting ways brought this Awesome, so instead, I shall take pride in my Ninja!

[dine]

OMG! this is so fabulous - please please please let there be more coming soon!!!!!

[thefourthvine]

Jim unfroze after a few seconds. "Scotty," he said into his communicator, "do you have a location for Commander Spock?"

"Aye, Captain. Should I beam him up?"

Jim hesitated, but no, he couldn't bet that a security team would be able to take down Spock, not when the stakes were the Enterprise and the odds were on Spock. "No. Just get a security team and a medical team to the transporter room right now, and get us directions to Spock's location." Uhura nudged him and pointed to Chekov. "And beam up Chekov. He's out cold."

"Aye. Commander Spock is sixteen degrees east of north from you. I'm downloading the location fix and tracker signature to Lieutenant Uhura's tricorder." Jim took off running; next to him, Uhura was already in motion, pulling out her tricorder as she ran.

There was a building up ahead - not the one with the Surak sex thing on it. This one was big and stone and had something written across it in orange. Uhura, whose legs were eating up the ground next to him even though she wasn't even breathing hard - how was that fair? - scanned it and said, "It says, 'I feel.'"

Jim winced. Uhura looked at her tricorder and ran up the stairs, and Jim ran after her. The door opened into a large room where a Vulcan boy was weeping, his face pressed against the wall, and maybe it was just overexposure to Spock, but seeing a crying Vulcan was freaking Jim out. He looked at Uhura, and she was staring at the boy, an expression on her face that Jim totally understood. "Uhura," he said. "Where?"

She bit her lip and looked down at the tricorder. "Up ahead. Left corridor." And they were running again. Up a flight of stairs, down a hallway, down a flight of stairs - what was it with Vulcans and stairs? - and then Uhura stopped. "He's here," she said, looking around. "We're right on top of his signal." They were in a little room at the bottom of the stairs, and there was obviously no one here. Uhura stepped forward and checked the door. "No," she said, and began playing with the settings on the tricorder. "I wish he hadn't stunned Chekov," she muttered to herself, "I only ever got 98% on my Advanced Scanning Techniques final, and I never even took Commander Boq's seminar because it always conflicted with -" Jim tuned her out - he'd gotten 81% on Advanced Scanning Techniques final, although he had kicked ass on the practical. But he wasn't going to turn into Chekov and rebuild the damn thing on the fly to get better resolution, either. Instead, he looked around.

And then he looked up. Vulcans apparently believed in air ducts. Also, Vulcans believed in high ceilings. "Uhura," Jim said. "If I boost you up, can you get in there?"

She followed she glance, dropped the tricorder, and said, "Bend over, sir." She climbed on his back, and Jim groaned - she looked so dainty, but she seriously was not. "Straighten up," she said. Jim tried, his back screaming in protest.

"Can't," he gasped.

"Okay." Uhura - fuck, Uhura stood up on his back, he was writing her up for this for serious. And then she was off his back and Jim straightened up painfully, moaning with relief.

"Damn," Uhura said from inside the air duct. And then she dropped some stuff on Jim's head.

Spock's uniform. Including his communicator. And including his underwear, which Jim had always wanted to see, but not exactly like this.

Uhura dropped down next to him.

"So here's what we know," Jim said. "Spock's somewhere around here, and he's crazy, and he can move faster than us, and in any direction. And we can't track him." Jim paused. "And he's naked." He was trying not to visualize that, but it wasn't easy.

"Yes, Captain," Uhura said, and then, because Uhura was not above turning the knife, she added. "What are your orders, sir?"

[cesy]

Heee, awesome. Is there more?