Title: All These Things That I Have Done
Fandom: Hollyoaks
Pairing: John Paul McQueen/Craig Dean
Categories: AU, slash, romance, prison
Length: Super Epic (167,000 words)
Warnings: Non-graphic descriptions of murder and its aftermath.

Author on LJ: gemjam, gemtastic
Author Website: gemjam

Author's Summary:
Craig can't watch the trial of 18-year-old John Paul and not want to do something to help. He just doesn't know what that something might be, and so he begins to send him books.

Review:
I'm an old-fashioned Hollyoaks fan. I watched Jambo climb in through Kurt's window in the first episode of this teen British soap opera, went away for a bit and came back in time for John Paul and Craig's long, glorious, angst-ridden courtship. Imagine my delight to find this gem of a story, then.

The story starts AU in so many ways. First, Craig didn't repeat his final year at school, so went to Hollyoaks Community College rather than Dublin. As a consequence he didn't meet John Paul, didn't fall in love, didn't panic himself into the closet and generally spent all his time holding his family together instead. John Paul, on the other hand, managed to get convicted for murdering his sister's abusive boyfriend, and that's all Craig knows about him.

What follows is a long, glorious, slightly angsty courtship between a prisoner and his good samaritan. It's wonderfully written, capturing the characters of both boys no matter how stubbornly stupid they get. And they do; just like in the original, neither of them has any common sense whatsoever when it comes to their relationship. I kept getting sucked back into Craig's point of view even when he was being the sort of idiot that he was in canon.

The author doesn't get blinkered on the relationship to the exclusion of all else, either; a lot of things happen in Hollyoaks village, particularly to the Dean and McQueen families, and they have knock-on effects on the boys. There are elements of being a fix-it for some of the more outrageous bits of Hollyoaks plots, but only as far as turning tragedies into dramas. It's a positive, uplifting story in general, but it doesn't succumb to giving everyone a happy ending.

It's damn good writing, and in a sadly underrepresented fandom. It's not perfect; I could quibble about the voices of some of the secondary characters, and the ending doesn't quite wrap up and round off properly to my mind. None the less, it's still one of the best things I've read all year.

All These Things That I Have Done