curuchamion | Happy Birthday, Beth!

Okay, so yesterday MacBedh (aka

lolmac ) was lamenting the way all Doctors before Ten seem to have been forgotten. So I promised her a Classic Who ficrec post. The recs are under the cut, culled from my favorites lists on both FFnet and A Teaspoon and an Open Mind, the main Whofic repository.

First off, though - it's Bedh's birthday! Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday, dear Beth, happy birthday to you! And also, I whipped up the silly little piece of caption-work below. (Moral: always save likely-looking screencaps to your hard drive. You never know when they'll come in handy.)

And now, of course, for the fic recs!

Okay... birthday. Birthday means cake, so... let's start with Cake and the Rani by

primsong ! Eight chapters of the best kind of crackfic - the kind where everyone is in character in a totally ridiculous situation. Third and Tenth Doctors, the Master, the Rani, and cake.

(Really, I could fill up this whole post with Primsong recs, but I won't - I'll just linky her FFnet profile and Teaspoon profile, for many hours of happy poking-around among gen tales of the first three Doctors if one's tastes run in that direction.)

Next up, just for the heck of it, a humor piece about a subsection of the Whoniverse that doesn't even fit into canon: Cushing's Lament by Nix Nada on FFnet, reportedly inspired by "a wistful-looking picture of Peter Cushing on a Dalek calendar". It's a cute little 16-line poem with Star Wars references as well as Who. (Oh, and Nix Nada writes 'Gate haiku, too.)

And an attempt - rather a good one, I think - to shoehorn Cushing!Doctor into canon: Doctor Who? by Arthur Dent on Teaspoon. Spoilers for Journey's End (Series 4 finale, New Who) and the Cushing Who movies.

Speaking of Arthur Dent and related topics, let me present The Recitation of the Daleks by Jessa L'Rynn. In which the Fourth Doctor meets Arthur Dent and the Daleks assimilate the Vogon fleet... this story is so much funnier than HHGTTG! (IMO, YMMV, etc.)

I seem to have a strange fondness for silly!Four fics, so here are a few more: The Fourth Doctor meets the Fifth Doctor - in prison - in Well, That Shouldn't Have Happened by aces. Petty arguments about yoyos and sonic screwdrivers ensue.

Don't Tell Mum, the Babysitter's an Alien by Darqstar is silly!Four plus a genre that is sadly lacking in Whodom - "main character playing with kid(s)" fic. Granted, Four's not quite as good at it as Jack O'Neill, but then who is? (Ouch! Pun not intended.)

Laundry by D.W. Vean is one of my guilty loves - pocketstuff fic! Which seldom has any point, but is oh-so-fun to make up ad nauseam. This is one of the more structured examples.

The A-Team and the TARDIS Incident and Doctor Who and Bogg, both by Atomdancerrr, are both quite good reading if, like me, you don't know the crossover fandoms. Otherwise, I couldn't say. ;-)

Doctor Who and the Nowhere Men by Rowena Zahnrei is a wonderful example of another story type common in Gatedom but seldom found in Whofic - the really long, scientifically convoluted romp through canon inconsistencies, leaving them all nicely ironed out behind us and producing a vague sense of dimensional origami in the mind of the reader - as well as that Whoniverse-unique genre, multi-Doctor fic. In this case it's Four (with Sarah Jane Smith and Harry Sullivan, my favorite TARDIS team) and Ten (with Rose being non-annoying for once - sorry, not exactly Rose!fen here) meeting the Beatles and using their music to save the universe. Really.

Multi-Doctor fic is another weakness of mine, actually. One of my favorites is After Life by Amy Wolf - a rather strange fic in a lot of ways, but I like it. (Okay, I like a lot of strange Nine stream-of-consciousness fic. It's a genre that tends to be oddly well-written, IMO.) Nine POV, takes place during The Christmas Invasion, references every Dalek story and every regeneration, and features all eight Classic Doctors.

Degeneration by merripestin is another multi-regeneration piece - one drabble for each of the first seven Doctors, each featuring one of the seven Endless from Neil Gaiman's "Sandman" (I think). If I had to pick my favorite single line in all of Who fandom, it'd be a close-run deal, but there's an even chance it'd come from this fic.

Then there's Laugh by Kesomon, set during the upcoming Ten-to-Eleven regeneration (you gotta love a fandom that writes good fic for things that haven't happened yet). Hands-down some of the best descriptions of all ten Doctors, based on the way each one laughs.

Finally (yes, I am finishing up at long last), I have an Eighth Doctor deathfic - sad, as are all tales of the Time War, and yet it may lift up your hearts (sorry; Tolkien fan, but then aren't we all?) and then a sorta-sequel, a Nine post-regeneration fic, by a different author.

The deathfic is Into Warsaw by ricebol on FFnet - the same author goes by the name of etherati on Teaspoon. "These are the last words of the last son of Gallifrey." Seriously, it's incredible.

And the post-regen is Home by

clocketpatch . The Ninth Doctor, angry and suicidal in the aftermath of the Time War, winds up at UNIT during the Third Doctor's exile. Three and Nine are my two favorite Doctors, and this is one of those stories I'd take to a desert island, whether or not I had the sense to include a boatbuilding manual in my luggage; it's beautiful and heartbreaking and filled with hope, every word perfectly selected to make a whole greater than the sum of its parts.