Hieroglyfics Recs

Geoffrey gen (as per the author; I read it as implied Geoffrey/Ellen). Geoffrey’s madness from the inside out. In this case, his madness is directing Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love, and if I knew this play, I am sure I would have gotten even more out of this story. As it is, there are all sorts of wonderful wry bits of metaphor and in-joke that even a dullard like me noticed. I thought it particularly brilliant to use Cheryl, the stage manager from Theatre Sans Argent in the first episode, as the grounding center of reality here.

Geoffrey/Ellen. Ellen returns to New Burbage, gets coaxed into doing Romeo and Juliet, and meets Geoffrey. What makes this work for me is the level of detail; it’s not just about the characters’ interactions, it is about their lives, and it all rings true, from the theatrical to the mundane. Ellen is totally spot on, and Geoffrey and Oliver ain’t bad either - I could hear them in my head while reading.

Slap Shot 2/RPF, Palmberg/Nos4a2no9 (the fanfic writer) Um. I have a real kink for crossovers between FPF and RPF. And the meta here is a lovely twist: we usually imagine ourselves meeting the characters we like, don’t we!

I KNOW. It’s been out for over a year, and I kind of hated it when I first watched it, because the music just makes me want to put my hands over my ears and scream. Not my thing. But every once in a while I seekritly rewatch it, because it’s so incredibly well done. All the matching between an actor’s gesture or motion as one character and his or her identical gesture as another - wow. So here, I’m reccing it, okay? Because it’s great. But I still hate the music.

Mostly gen with reference to Geoffrey/Ellen and Cyril/Frank. The backstory of Geoffrey’s going mad during Hamlet is such a fact of canon that it could have been a dull story, but telling it through Cyril’s eyes gives it a fresh twist. Plus, yay for a Cyril story, with hints of his own drama and life.

Anna-centric mostly gen with a bit of Anna/Nahum. This was my absolutely favorite Yuletide story this year, and is my favorite S&A story ever. Anna returns from Bolivia to the “Theotre sons Argent,” as typed with Geoffrey’s old typewriter that turns a’s into “circular blobs,” and takes charge. The dialogue is fabulous, the details wonderful, and every character voice absolutely perfect. Quirky and charming, and as those who were in S&A chat with me know, Anna/Nahum is my seekrit OTP.

Geoffrey/Ellen, Oliver/Geoffrey. Both hysterically funny and achingly sad: Geoffrey and Ellen have a literal ghost in bed with them as they rekindle their old flame.

RPF, Hugh Dillon/Callum Keith Rennie, set during the period before Hard Core Logo filming. Hugh struts around and acts like a jerk until he realizes that the reason Callum won’t have casual sex with him is that Callum’s not casual about Hugh. The sex is nngh hot, and the emotion is just as raw and urgent.

Geoffrey, Oliver, Charles gen. An astonishing AU take on a plot element in the third season. The story read entirely like the show: I heard every bit of dialogue in my head, I saw every bit of staging. And in my head I was going, oh my GOD oh my GOD, as I realized where the story was going.

Oliver/Geoffrey. Pre-season 1, a somewhat drunk and maudlin Oliver tells the story of how he discovered Geoffrey to a jaded bartender. The voice is fantastic, and the characterization very believable. The allusion in the title makes me grin, but the grin is gone by the sobering end.

Geoffrey/Ellen. Smart and sensitive and evocative in all the right ways without being overdone. Post-S3, Geoffrey’s in Montreal, alone, while Ellen finishes her contractual obligations. I particularly love Ellen, who seems to have just stepped right out of S3.

Ray Kowalski/Geoffrey Tennant. This is a wonderful due South/Slings & Arrows crossover in which Ray and Geoffrey meet in an airport during a snowstorm. This is my favorite type of crossover (and actually reminds me quite a bit of my own dS/Wilby crossover Islands), in which the actor-identity aspect is exploited for the story, with the real pairing behind the scenes clearly Ray/Fraser, and the imagined intersection of the characters seems very true. Funny, sweet and sad, with a satisfying ending.

Joe/Billy. Awesome structure, and some really cool and different ideas that pull this one above the usual HCL fic. There’s some fabulous writing in it and some odd grammatical errors, but overall I like it lots.

Kate/Jack, PG13. What happens after Jack and Kate go off to Hawaii. Not only did the characters seem entirely true to what we saw of them in canon, the whole story arc seemed to me to be not only plausible, but also consistent with the type of story S&A would tell - it was like the story intended for a spin-off that was never filmed - and there’s a lovely resonance with the very beginning of S&A which I won’t reveal, but which I thought oddly fitting.

Ensemble (Fraser, RayK, Maggie, Bob, Frannie, and Dief/Ante :-), G, vid. I can’t believe a vid is making me all misty-eyed, but this is just…awww. There are all sorts of nice moments, like Fraser and Bob walking together in rhythm to the song, and the Dief/Ante is just…awww. Follow the download instructions carefully. File is .mp4 - I played it in VLC.

Tim Bayliss/Billy Tallent. This is a rewritten version of Shell’s first fanfic, and as someone who tried but failed to read the earlier version, I can say this is a bazillion times better, with tightness and focus and pacing that was missing from the first attempt. Bayliss is undercover, posing as a member of a Utah polygamist cult that is clearly based on the Fundamentalist LDS church. This is the element that originally attracted me to this story; I saw a documentary about the FLDS, Banking on Heaven, at a film festival earlier this year, and I can say that as horrifying as the elements of this story are, they’re not very far removed from the reality.

Just before going undercover, Bayliss meets Billy Tallent, who while in Arizona to play a concert meets a young escapee from the cult, who is subsequently murdered. The two men feel an instant connection. In fact, for me, it’s a little too instant - not the immediate sex, but the closeness of their relationship afterward - and because of this, the story feels more like an established-relationship story than a first-time, to me. (By the way, if I were rating this story I’d give it NC17, because the sex scenes are explicit.)

If you, like me, don’t know anything about Homicide, skim (or ignore) the prologue, which will only baffle you. (Interestingly, I discovered after reading that Bayliss is canonically bisexual.) If you don’t know anything about HCL, don’t worry. In fact, IMHO the characterization of Billy is a long stretch from canon, even given the passage of time and the way the events of HCL (which this story does spoil) might have affected him. But actually, this Billy is a far more sympathetic and even heroic character - to the point that I felt as though some of his actions (and some aspects of their relationship) were unrealistic for anybody. But, you know what? I didn’t care. It was still a great read, and hurt/comfort fans will sigh happily.

A gen Firefly/Slings & Arrows crossover that fills me with glee! My knowledge of Firefly is basically from seeing Serenity, and I understood the story just fine. (If you don’t know S&A, you won’t get the full depth of the story, but you’ll still get it okay.)

Geoffrey/Darren, perhaps PG13/R-ish, and hysterically funny, with totally spot-on dialogue.

Dan/Val, Dan/Duck, Dan/OMC. Backstory on Dan: who he was and how he came to be the character we know from the movie. This story gives solidity and dimension to Dan’s character, and creates a Val I can believe in and both sympathize with and dislike. The scenario of what could have happened before the movie seems not just plausible but real.

Men With Brooms, Amy/Cutter. Amy wakes up on the morning after; I really love Amy’s POV, that she’s messed up and she knows it but is still helpless in the grip of it, the way she feels and analyzes her own feelings. The other characters seem totally true to their movie selves, especially Eddie, dear God, who cracked me up. I especially like the way the characterization is built through incidental detail and through dialogue.

Mostly gen. Billy comes to terms with his feelings of guilt over Joe’s death. The structure is really cool, alternating interview snippets with Billy’s interactions with the various people in his life: the members of Jenifur, Mary, and most especially John Oxenburger, who really shines here in the same sort of role he has in the film. John is the Greek Chorus, the voice of reason in a most ironic sense, and he cuts through to the heart of Billy’s emotional turmoil.

Billy finds letters that Joe had written him before their final tour. So it’s sort of semi-epistolary fic: Joe’s letters and Billy’s reactions to them. An interesting device to make it more of a story than just Billy angsting.

Joe/Billy, crossover with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (although you don’t need to know that movie to understand this story). Billy gets his memories of Joe erased. Nifty reverse-chronological structure, cool and creepy.

This story is a set of vignettes from various POVs - Sandra, Carol, Emily, Buddy, and Dan, in the days after the events of the movie. Wilby Wonderful is really an ensemble movie, and even though the relationship between Duck and Dan (yay!) is the common thread running through this story, all the little bits of the other characters’ lives - Carol’s slow reconciliation with Buddy and stepping back from the edge of her own personal destruction, Emily and MacKenzie (so funny and so sweet!) - are what really make this one work for me. Just lovely.

Ensemble, due South crossover with Men With Brooms, humor. Curling! Beavers! CANADA! This is great, and the editorial comments are priceless.

John Oxenberger character piece. This really captures John’s lunacy and emotional lability. Plus, one can only watch so many depressing Joe-centric vids (all with the clip of you-know-what) - it was refreshing to see something else.

Joe/Billy, angst. The song works extraordinarily well with the subject matter. I liked the timing with the gunshot, the punches, the kiss etc and the nice intercuts of them playing.

Joe/Billy. Portrait of a fucked-up relationship. It’s all about power and, again, head games. (As is the movie, in many ways…)

Joe/Billy. Sex, head games, and self-deception.

Please note that this story was originally posted anonymously, so if you comment on the stories the author may not see your comment. If you want to comment, it might be better to comment on one of the author’s comment replies, so she gets your comment in email.

Joe/Billy, Billy/various both m and f. I assume if you’re reading this rec, you know the movie, but be warned there are spoilers in this rec (as well as, obviously, in the story itself).

Maybe it’s because I started out in HP fandom, where ghosts are characters too, but I really adore afterlife fic. This story begins with Joe’s death - how Billy deals with it, and how Joe deals with it. And neither of them deal with it very well. But then Joe’s shade starts haunting Billy, so to speak, and things start to change. I won’t say too much about how they change, because the slow build of the story to the eventual realization and climax is so artfully done that I don’t want to spoil it. I’ll just say that the author is very clever, and everything fits together beautifully and logically.

The story is structured beautifully, with clever choices of repetition and variation. Each scene contributes something, and the bits wrap in on themselves perfectly. One of my particular favorites is the scene with Bucky Haight; another is the scene just before that, with Ashley’s dad. Finally, there’s a lot of very hot sex throughout, but none of it feels gratuitous. It’s all there for a reason, and the reason becomes clear as the story builds to, er, the climax.

The summary is: They fought for the first time sixty-seven days after Dan left the hospital, but the story never explicitly describes the fight. Instead the fight is shown as negative ground, almost, as the hole around which the other events are woven. It’s gentle and in keeping with the feel of the movie, and I especially like that Duck’s capacity for violence and his “dark past” are alluded to, because that doesn’t make it into a lot of Wilby stories.

Duck/Dan. Dan finally makes his own decisions about his life.

Duck/Dan. Mmm sexy.