Notes and acknowledgements at the end, there are so many. This is the cake shop AU. It's also a kosher bakery AU. And a grad student AU. Okay, it's an AU, right. They have mutant powers. They bicker about meringues and people drop other people's keys down the toilet. Okay.
I don't think there are any warnings, but I appreciate that this story is long and contains lots - if you want to email/message about something specific, please do.
[It's in two parts because of LJ's posting limits. Just click on at the end.]
Fic:: New Beautiful Things Come by Raven 17,500w, X-Men: First Class, modern AU, Charles/Erik, Raven, Moira, Emma.
For the most part, though, I'm happy living in Cambridge, and living with Shim is working out well. I miss the States, but I always will and it's nice here. It's just work that's making me miserable at the moment. I'm told it gets better; I hope it will.
2. Possibly unwisely, I have tickets for The Civil Wars in a couple of weeks. I haven't seen live music for years, I'm very excited.
3. So, a few weeks back gavagai made me watch X-Men, and I really enjoyed it; then I watched some of the other films, finishing with X-Men: First Class. I think y'all knew this. I think some of you also knew I had got fed up with trying to fix the movie to suit me, and decided to write Charles/Erik in a cake shop AU instead.
Well, 17,500 words later I have finally got that story out to beta. (happydork is to blame - it was going to be a story about, y'know, cake. And maybe some kissing. Then she said, "Shouldn't it be a kosher bakery?" - and the rest is a great deal of history.)
The problem, y'see, that work has taken away all of my critical faculties. (And everything else, too: I went out for dinner with some of my colleagues on Thursday night, and we'd gone to a Nando's which, I believe, has the sort of menu where you pick things from column A, B, C, etc. The problem is that schedules of deeds are also in columns marked A, B and C. I couldn't order. Someone had to do it for me.) So while I had all sorts of issues with XMFC - and still do - I ship Charles/Erik. I really do. I ship them like I'm twelve and it's Sirius/Remus.
(I mean. Sirius/Remus. I only stopped shipping them when I had done all the shipping - when you didn't need to ship them, they had been shipped.)
So here are some recs of what I've been reading, in lieu of anything approaching original content:
Call Me By His Name, by sinuous_curve Charles wakes from the absence of noise. Charles and Erik, afterwards. It's beautiful, this, and thoughtful, and just, very very good.
The Emperor's New Clothes, by ignipes Ignipes used to write fantastic HP fic, I remember; this one has a lot of what I loved about that, it's subtle and clever and also really hilarious. Emma and Mystique try to stop Magneto wearing rubbish outfits! It's awesome. [via gavagai]
all the fears you left behind by londondrowning He angles the gun [...] and suddenly there is nothing funny here, nothing at all. This is totally fascinating in that it really gets inside Erik's head - what it's like to be him. I thought it was very well-done.
The Winter of Banked Fires, by yahtzee63. My favourite, here. I'm fond of all Yahtzee's writing - her way of seeing characters and relationships is a lot like mine - and this one's no exception. It's basically a gigantic fix-it that's sort of set after the first trilogy of films, and it's lovely, novel-length and just what I wanted to read. Logan and Rogue get together, gently, realistically, in a way that I totally didn't expect to find interesting and then did; and Charles and Erik fight, make up, put to rest fifty years of demons and make fun of disco. It is just lovely.
[I just figured something out! This is JUST LIKE SIRIUS/REMUS. THEIR LOVE IS PURE AND TRUE AND DOOMED.
okay, you carry on with your day.]
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anxious