It's hurt/comfort week. Beware, this one's more hurt than comfort!

Title: Roulette by Alyse and Chya (NC-17)
Fandom: CI5: The New Professionals
Pairing: Chris Keel/Sam Curtis
Categories: drama, slash, hurt/comfort, angst, violence.
Length: Epic (84,000 words)
Warnings: Rape, violence, torture, minor character suicide, slavery

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

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

Authors' Summary:
When CI5 are asked to carry out a routine surveillance assignment, a face from Sam Curtis' past brings back a nightmare he'd hoped to escape from and has dire consequences for his friend and partner, Chris Keel.

Review:
The first thing to say is that the warnings above aren't kidding. This is not a nice story. It's the sort of story where if you see fluffy bunnies playing in a field, it means that they're about to be eaten by a pack of rabid wolves. There is plenty of hurt here, and the comfort is a long time coming. It's about as dark a story as I can cope with (I confess to being a wuss), all the more unpleasant because it doesn't sacrifice any realism on the way.

The storytelling swaps between "present day" (about 2000) London and 1993 Moscow. In the earlier time, a very young Sam Curtis is working for MI6 infiltrating a Russian mobs boss, and discovering the enormity of what his controller isn't telling him. In the present, Sam is working for CI5 and discovers that one of that mobster's lieutenants is now a boss in his own right, and remembers Sam. Both stories are harrowing reads, all the more so because we get the earlier timeline jumbled up as the horrific memories become relevant again.

In a way, this story spoiled me for the noir style of storytelling where Our Hero (or Heroine — I'm looking at you, Anita Blake) gets absurdly beaten up or otherwise harmed, but keeps on going to save the day in a way wholly inconsistent with their injuries. Chris and Sam do get badly injured, but the authors keep to the right side of plausibility (and took medical advice, for that matter). Even their ability to save the day isn't overdone, and a lot of the climactic rescue has to be carried out by the rest of CI5. More importantly, much of the real, lasting damage is psychological, and that doesn't get glossed over either. We get to see the start of the healing, and the blossoming of a relationship, but it's only the start and no one has any illusions that it's all going to be easy from then on.

Roulette isn't a story to read lightly, but it is a story to read, even if like me you normally prefer your fiction to be more cheery.

Roulette