Readers' Recs!

We've come to the end of our Epic/Super!Epic Theme Week, with 6 recs covering 7 fandoms. Now we'd love to hear from you. Do you have a favorite fic that's 40,000 words or longer?

Things to keep in mind:

• Recced stories can be any fandom and any pairing (or no pairing), as long as they fit the theme.
• You don't need to write a review (unless you want to). All that you need to include are title, author, and link to the story (all parts if there are more than one).
• Fic or media as a single file are preferred, if available.


• WE ARE CURRENTLY SEEKING A NEW RECCER. Reccers are accepted by invitation only and the invitations are issued primarily based on their response to RR posts. If you're interested in reccing once each week, respond to this post (or one of the previous RR posts) with a full rec, including everything in our rec template: Title, Author, Rating, Pairing, Genres, Length, Summary, and Review (including a paragraph or more about why you liked the story).
  
• If you'd like to use our reccing template, you can find it under the cut.

( Totally Optional Rec Template )

Today's Topic: Long Stories

Previous Readers' Recs topics can be found here.

Title: MMObound
Fandom: Homestuck
Pairing: Karkat Vantas/Sollux Captor
Categories: AU, Humanstuck, First time, Romance, Friendship, Humor, Gaming, Comic-con, Cosplay
Length: Long (18,262)
Warnings: Both characters are drunk, and one is very drunk (but very consenting) the first time clothes come off.

Author on LJ: NA (as far as I know)
Author Website: let2gotwoapplebee2

Author's Summary:
Sollux Captor is 22 years old, a successful freelance web designer, and an avid player of the wildly successful MMORPG, Grubquest.

Karkat Vantas is 19 years old, a cranky CS-major freshman, and an avid player of the wildly successful MMORPG, Grubquest.

Sollux and Karkat are the worst best friends and one of the top player-pairs in the game.
In a month, they're meeting for the first time and it's exciting... and terrifying.

Review:
If you like your gooey center of affection inside a hard candy shell of profane snark, you should enjoy this. I'm troll obsessed, and Karkat and Sollux are my favorites, but with this being a nerdy human AU, anyone who likes the first blush of geek love could jump in and follow the plot.

Karkat and Sollux have a strong online friendship (and there's much use of chat and their typing quirks). They're smartasses most of the time, with exceptions like Karkat's hesitant coming out and Sollux's low point when he stops taking his meds. Though he's only three years older, Sollux is the one out in the world working, so he's quietly protective of his friend. Then they meet in person when they share a hotel room at a comic-con.

I love the places where bluster gives way to vulnerable affection and then swings back to bluster. My favorite scenes are at con, including the first evening at the hotel, Sollux's turn as a Sailor Star, the second night, and the morning after. I feel like there's a bit of a drop off after that, in the final two short chapters, but it wasn't enough to keep me from enjoying the heck out of this and hoping you will too.

MMObound (AO3)

Title: Blackjack
Fandom: CI5: The New Professionals
Pairing: Chris Keel/Sam Curtis
Categories: action/adventure, thriller, pre-canon, romance, hurt/comfort.
Length: Epic (92,150 words)
Warnings: Minor character death, violence, torture, all the sort of unpleasantness you would expect from a spy novel.

Authors on LJ: alyse and chya
Author Website: Unconscious Mind (Alyse), alyse and chya

(For the authors' New Pros stories you are better off trawling through the CI5 Ops Control archive site.)

Author's Summary: When an assignment goes wrong, and Chris Keel is captured, his captor hands him over as a gift to an arms dealer with a reputation for ruthlessness. But is this man what he seems? AU for a certain key aspect of the series.

Review:
CI5: The New Professionals was an attempt to reboot The Professionals in the late 1990s, with an international cast in an attempt to spread its appeal. In place of the original Bodie and Doyle (ex-SAS and Police respectively), we had Chris Keel (ex-US Navy SEAL) and Sam Curtis (ex-MI6), along with Tina Backus (Canadian hacker and sharpshooter). Also huge amounts of slash potential, to the point where I'm fairly certain the writers must have been aware of old Pros fanfiction. Remember the names, though; there will be a quiz later.

Blackjack is set before the series starts when Chris Keel's partner is killed and he is captured and interrogated. This turns out to be part of a game being played by an arms dealer to distract his main rival, Stuart Carstairs, and Chris becomes a pawn in that game. From there on, things only get more complicated, and a somewhat broken Chris has to figure out who, if anyone, he should trust.

This is not a nice story. It contains violence and torture easily on a par with recent Bond movies, and in fact fits that genre pretty well. People die in a variety of unpleasant ways. There is plenty of psychological torture as well as physical, with deceptions and betrayals on all sides taking their toll on everyone. It's a hard read; I am not a fan of dark fiction, and this is as dark as I go.

It's a rewarding read, though. In this crucible of violence and uncertainty, Alyse and Chya forge a believably strong relationship between the main characters. Watching them keep each other alive and sane, and believe me that last one matters, is the joy of the whole story. It carries right through to the end, giving the reader enough of an emotional payoff to make it worth while getting there, and leaving you believing that this could have been the start of the series that could never have been shown on prime time.

An excellent story, but not one to read lightly.

Blackjack