Rec Category: John Sheppard
Pairing: John Sheppard / Cameron Mitchell
Category: Slash, Crossover, Pre-Canon
Warning: NC-17 slash
Author on LJ:
frostfire_17Author's Website:
Fanfiction by FrostfireLink:
Here Is No WaterWhy This Must Be Read:
And it’s right there at the beginning, first report after a year-long hiatus. Colonel Marshall Sumner dead, Major John Sheppard in command.
Cameron blinks at the report for a second or two, but the words don't change.
And for some eternal moment, he's caught between no wonder they nearly died forty-seven different times and no wonder they're all still alive.
See, John Sheppard? He has
charisma. In the old sense of the word, the one that isn't synonymous with "physical attraction" but rather personal magnetism -- the kind of people who inspire rapt fascination in those around them, whether it be positive or negative, the kind of people who seem to be a little sharper, a little more
there than the rest of the people around them. And people around people like that get desensitized to it quickly, which is why sometimes you need an outside perspective to re-set your perceptions and recalibrate your expectations. In fiction, it manifests itself in some of the sharpest, some of the most in-depth perceptions of John coming from an outside observer, someone who hasn't ever met John before.
This is a crossover with SG-1, but if you only know SGA, don't let it stop you. This story is set in Afghanistan, before either man had ever heard of the Stargate program; it's a brutal, fascinating, beautiful look at what war is and at the men who fight it. The author comments that she doesn't necessarily think that these are the people John and Cameron
are, but it's definitely the people they could have been, and I can't agree more. The John in this story is sharp and prickly and edged, casual and lazy and at the same time full of barely leashed rage at the entire universe, and it highlights so beautifully how people are just
drawn to that -- fascinated and repulsed at the same time. The interactions here aren't prettied up and they aren't watered down; they're real and they're raw and the author resists the urge to fix them up and make them neat and tidy with a happy resolution.
The minute I read this story, it catapulted itself to being one of my top three fics I think really just flat-out
nail John's characterization. The last section especially.