Fancake

Fandom: Stargate Atlantis/Stargate SG1
Characters/Pairings: John Sheppard/Rodney McKay, usual Atlantis ensemble, many of the SG1 ensemble.
Rating: M to T
Length: 242,078 (310,967 for the series)
Creator Links: auburn on AO3
Theme: Amnesty, Favourite fanworks, Future fic, Getting Back Together, Novel length, character development, action/adventure, epic works, established relationship + plot, pining.

Summary: War and peace, ebb and flow, love and loss, damned duty and dearest enemies, end and begin and come around again. When the Stargate Program goes public, old loyalties are set against new ambitions for the Atlantis team.

Reccer's Notes: I recently re-read this series, of which the fic above is the central, longest work. It brought back to me how much I love this series, especially The Water Grinds the Stone, despite how angsty it is in parts. The series starts with The Taste of Apples, a genfic story where the original AR1 team are infected and subsumed by a planet-sized fungus-creature, then there's Sacrificial Drift, a mission-gone-wrong in which John and Rodney get together and have to grapple with the ramifications of the relationship when things go badly wrong. Then comes The Water Grinds the Stone, a double-novel-length saga about their continuing relationship, being intermittently separated by SGC shenanigans, the progression of their careers and Rodney's research, a worsening separation, a disastrous (all-too-believable) Declassification process, more disasters and eventual reconciliation. There's a lot of loneliness across much of the fic caused by Rodney's love of science/Atlantis keeping him there, with John increasingly bound to Earth by duty and the machinations of the SGC, but there's an eventual happy ending which is expanded on in the coda fic, The Weight of Water. It's all enormously well written and gripping, with truckloads of plot and action/adventure as well as relationship and character development. There's some of auburn's usual dystopian edge with the SGC bureaucracy very much ruthless and Machiavellian, and the political developments after Declassification are harrowing and scarily reminiscent of the past few years in America. A major work, and well worth a re-read if you haven't done so for a while.

Fanwork Links: The Water Grinds the Stone.
The series link is here: Salt On a Wound

Fandom: Firefly/Stargate Atlantis
Characters/Pairings: River Tam/Rodney McKay
Rating: PG
Length: 4253 words
Creator Links: Main Index for old website (Wayback)  SGA & SG1 fic Index (Wayback) and on LJ
Theme: crossovers, crossover pairings, future fic.
It's not AU if you accept the premise that Firefly-verse is in the very far future, compared to Stargate-verse. 

Summary: "If she listens hard enough she can hear the 'verse singing its creation."

Reccer's Notes: This is a classic and for many of you this rec will be a reminder rather than something new. It won't be for everyone as it's not McShep, and as everyone else from Stargate-verse apart from Rodney is long dead and gone, millennia ago. But if you can set that aside it's an amazing story and a great crossover, and Rodney and River are, in the end, a surprisingly believable pairing. It's one of my favourites. 

Fanwork Links: The Big Bang and Everything After