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Title:  Rubric
Fandom:  One Piece
Pairing:  Smoker/Ace
Categories:  Angst, action/adventure, romance, drama
Length:  Epic [~55,000 words]
Warnings:  violence, allusions to prison-abuse and slavery (canon)


Author on LJ:  manic_intent 
Website:  Her page at the Pit of Voles

Review:  Smoker gets permission from Headquarters to pursue Fire-Fist Ace.  Both end up in a tangled plot to prevent CP9, the World Government and the leader of the fishmen from acquiring a valuable weapon.

Smoker and Ace are one of the fandom's crackier OTPs, and I was delighted to find an epic-length story that was both about them and had the One Piece signature zany adventures included.  (For those who don't know much about this fandom or pairing, but are tentatively interested, let me just say that Smoker is a justice-loving Marine who can turn into a cloud of smoke, and that Ace is Luffy's pirate brother who can turn into a ball of fire.  When they met via stumbling literally into each other's laps (!!!), Smoker realized that he had run into a non-law abiding citizen and chased him down on his steam-powered motorcycle (!!!); once Smoker caught up with Ace, they immediately got into a fight in their alter-forms and were wrapped around each other for the entire scene (!!!!!!!!!!!).  Ho-Yay and Foe-Yay for the win!)

This author created a passel of OCs, who are so engaging and very much behaving in the style of One Piece that the reader can't mind their presence at all, and will indeed grow fond of them.  In addition to the necessary OCs, Manic Intent crafted a plausible and exciting mission for Smoker and Ace to undertake, and with their dynamic of "frenemies" ramped up to eleven, the resulting romance manages to be both 1) believable and 2) hot.  I don't want to spoil the twists of that adventure, so I won't describe it any further - but the resolution is satisfying to the protagonists and devastating to the antagonists, so that's all right.  Plus, Manic Intent did not forget that Ace has been - canonically - under a lot of stress, and that his PTSD *needed* to be addressed for him to have any sort of healthy relationship with Smoker.  Lots of other authors seem to just glide over that issue, so I was pleased to see it handled so well. 

Rubric  - link goes to last chapter, which links to all the others at the top.