Fancake

Fandom: Stargate Atlantis
Characters/Pairings: John Sheppard/Rodney McKay, Laura Cadman
Rating: Explicit
Length: 6655
Content Notes: No AO3 warnings apply. You'll need to remember that at one point in the story - but it's true!
Creator Links: rageprufrock on AO3
Themes: Mentors & proteges, First time, Pre-Canon, Backstory, Getting back together

Summary: "You can't possibly be this stupid," is what Rodney finally decides to start with.

Reccer's Notes: This is set considerably before canon, with Rodney as a young (short-term) high school teacher and John his sixteen-year-old student. As is frequently the case in Stargate Atlantis fandom, they fall for each other, and at one point it seems as though Rodney's going to betray his position. A clever - and very hot - fic, if you don't mind the author skating close to statutory rape (but, I promise, not actually going there). In the end all's well, even if they are stuck in Pegasus with life-sucking aliens.

Fanwork Links: Lock the Door - locked to AO3, and the podfic by twilight is here

Fandom: Heated Rivalry
Characters/Pairings: Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov, Cliff Marleau, Connors
Rating: Mature
Length: 5144
Content Notes: no AO3 warnings apply. Descriptions of illness, choking, vomiting.
Creator Links: Ragazza_Guasto on AO3, sd_ryan on AO3
Themes: Crack treated seriously, Pining, Getting back together, Canon LGBTQ+ characters, Angst with a happy ending

Summary: “Can you believe it? How the hell did he end up bagging her?”

Ilya stared, brain not comprehending what his body already seemed to, that Hollander was dating-

“Rose fuckin’ Landry! How does the lamest guy in the League-”

He knew that smile. He thought it was for him, just for him. But it wasn't.

“No,” he whispered. His stomach spasmed.

“You good, Roz?”

Why would he- How could he-

They were holding hands…

“Rozanov? What the fuck?”

He jumped up from the table and stumbled for the front door, just barely making it through before the first mass of petals came up. He heaved as he ran, trying desperately to get away from the pavement, somewhere he could hide what was happening.

Unfortunately, his teammates had followed, because of course they would. He saw a photo of Shane Hollander holding hands with a movie star and promptly threw up.

Who wouldn't be curious?

Reccer's Notes: Hanahaki disease, where a sufferer of unrequited love starts bringing up flowers, has to be one of the crackiest tropes ever. In this story Ilya develops Hanahaki after seeing the pics of Shane going out with Rose Landry. But it's not some gently romantic fluttering of petals from his lips, it's bloodily bringing up a hard, painful tulip bulb, then more flowers, more bulbs. I guess the trope always has a potentially serious outcome (death vs requited love) but to me the "treated seriously" aspects here are the medical details and treatment, the painful and unromantic way the disease affects Ilya, and the way the fic cleverly incorporates his family history, via his mother. Ilya gets very sick indeed before Shane finds out, with inevitable results. Well written, and a great read.

Fanwork Links: All I Do is Stay Winning
All I Do is Stay Winning (podfic by sd_ryan)

Fandom: Hunt for the Wilderpeople
Characters: Ricky Baker, Hec, Bella
Rating: G
Length: 00:01:00
Content Notes: none apply
Creator Links: naye on AO3
Theme: Indigenous characters, Family, Friendship, Getting back together, Small fandoms

Summary: Then I am home now, though I am far away

Reccer's Notes: a lovely vid that encapsulates the movie, and an introduction to this canon for my next rec.

Fanwork Links: They say home is the place where your heart is

Fandom: Game of Thrones
Characters/Pairings: Robb Stark/Everyone (plus other romantic and friendship ones, seriously too many to list)
Rating: Explicit
Length: 176,765
Content Notes: astolat "chose not to warn". Canon-typical graphic violence.
Creator Links: astolat on AO3
Themes: Amnesty, Novel-length, Action/adventure, Polyamory, Politics, Family, Family of choice, just all the tags!

Summary: There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival. — Thornton Wilder

Reccer's Notes:
This epic story has been posting across the past two weeks, and is now complete. It's an amazing ride, the absolute epitome of that meme where the book is a juicy hamburger, the movie/tv show is a thin, meagre burger, and the fanfic is a huge luscious stack of burgers two feet high. This story is that last, delicious, fulsome stack all by itself! It's a retelling of the entire story with Robb Stark (in his latest favourite astolat incarnation as the brilliant boy-general and gifted young King of the North), basically fucking his way through the seven kingdoms and creating a huge family (pack) that binds together not only Westeros but also Volantis and much of the East. While doing this, the Starks, Brienne, Jaime, Tyrion, Margaery, Danaerys, Oberon, Sam and all the others we know and love help in their various ways and have their own redemption arcs. It's the ultimate fix-it fic, managing to cram masses of clever plot and action in together with complex psychology, thrilling battles, utter farce, real drama and tragedy, various baddies getting their comeuppance, and feel-good happy endings without sentimentality. It's a triumph. Read it.

Fanwork Links: The Pack Survives

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