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gabvinus · 4 months ago

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a jake simmonds/mickey smith fic recommendations post

hello, it's me, who for some reason set up camp in this particular corner of rarepair hell back in, like, 2012 and has not left. i've tried, but i live here now. all because i watched age of steel and thought:

there are 80 fics in the jake/mickey tag on ao3, and a handful scattered on ff.net. here are the ones i've returned to over the years. <3

The Spiral by LetThemRot

excerpt:

Harriet Jones is on the tele, like she's been for the last ten nights, saying that yes, the Cybermen are gone (it's taken three years for the information to get out - the factories have been sealed off and uninvestigated for so long that none of the public noticed), and no, it's not information that the public has access to. Everyone should understand this and get on with their lives. The Cybermen have been separate for a long time - now they're just gone for good. Let the authorities handle this.

But she is Jackie Tyler, and she knows the authorities. She's living with three of them.

summary: The Doctor is in one world, Rose Tyler in another, and the Void stretches between them. Life in the days following the Battle of Canary Wharf, told by those stranded in Pete's World.

thoughts: on any given day there is a 50% chance that i am thinking about this fic and chewing on the walls. this was the first jake/mickey fic i ever read and i might have to credit it with how unhinged i am about this ship. it follows rose, mickey, jake, pete, and jackie after the events of doomsday, and it is so canon in my brain that getting through the immediately post-doomsday parts of my own fic was a real challenge because i wanted to just go "look, go read The Spiral and come back, that's what happens." it is in my writer DNA. i could not choose one of the actual jake/mickey parts of the story for the excerpt because i just want you to go read it and experience it. i love it so much.

These Conversations We Have by LetThemRot

excerpt:

Rose turns away once Jake presses his lips to Mickey's. It's not the jealousy of what they have, or the daydreaming - so she tells herself - it's the roommate-kissing-your-ex-boyfriend factor. It's not the unfair way that they can be happy and know (roughly) where the other is at all times and whether they're safe. It's just the roommate-and-ex-boyfriend factor - that's all. She plants her chin on a jumper-covered fist and stares resolutely at the screen, not seeing a single atom of it.

summary: Things said and heard in Pete's World. Life is hard when everyone has a different idea of what's right. Post-Doomsday, pre-Journey's End.

thoughts: like the above, this fic is in my writer DNA. rose, queen of burnout, is determined to get the dimension cannon working even if it kills her. rose & jake are besties and flatmates, which is truly a delight because they're both goddamn disasters. this is also a fic which doesn't shy away from how - even if jake & mickey get their shit together and decide to date - the ghost of ricky smith will never be easily disregarded.

Not Made of Tin by Nope

excerpt:

Three years before this, he comes awake, startled into the sudden chill of the back of the van. He can't hear, can't remember the noise that brought him out of the dark into this bleary half-light, tinted, smeared windows and Jake snuffle-snoring in the front seat, but there are seabird screeches and the faint rough hum of traffic and he has the strangest craving for ice-cream, proper fake soft Mister Whippy style ice-cream, all chemicals and sugar buzz cold. They should sell that on the sea-front, he reckons. That's what people do, even in foreign parts. Assuming they even have ice-cream in this damn dimension and, if they don't, he's going to invent it and make a fucking fortune. How hard can it be?

thoughts: this is a dark fic - I'd add a warning about non-con & rate this E - but it also has some really excellent, prickly characterization & an intriguing narrative structure. ymmv depending on your tolerance for the aforementioned warnings. but i love fics that put the characters' flaws front & centre, so on the list it goes! (this was also written in 2009, so there's some ableist language that wouldn't fly today, fwiw.)

Guy Fawkes Has Nothing on Us by misspamela ( @miss-pamela on tumblr)

excerpt:

It was three days before Mickey got himself together enough to freak out.

He woke up an hour after he'd gone to sleep, with Jake sitting first watch up front and the communications equipment turned down to a dull hum. The van was dark, not the dark of his room at home, ringed with fluorescent lighting, and not the whirring, yellowish dark of the TARDIS. Cold dark. Alien dark.

Next thing, he's thrashing about and yelling, knocking wires and ammunition to the floor.

"You're not losing it, mate?" Jake scrambled into the back of the van.

All Mickey can think of to say is, "I've never even been to Greece."

thoughts: this hits my favourite tone of "lighthearted banter with some emotions & growing fondness" <3 i'm very fond of fics where there's clearly an action movie plot happening in the background, but that's not the focus dammit the feelings are the focus

Rain Like Ghosts by carolinecrane

excerpt:

Jake shifted against him, somehow moving closer without touching any more than he had to. Like he was afraid what Mickey would say if he noticed how close they were. Like it would be possible for Mickey to miss it. And it was probably just as well the French blokes had given them a room of their own, because Jake's arm had landed on top of him somehow and his hand was pressed against Mickey's chest, heat radiating from his fingers and making Mickey feel in a way he hadn't for a long time.

thoughts: god bless carolinecrane for writing many of the fics in the jake/mickey tag. idk where you are now but i salute you 🫡 in any case, who can resist a "there was only one bed" fic

Birds by carolinecrane

excerpt:

He liked the way Mickey kissed him -- different from Ricky, less intense but sweeter somehow -- and he liked that Mickey needed him more than Ricky ever had.

He didn't think much about what that said about him until Rose crashed back into Mickey's life, dragging her mum with her and suddenly Mickey didn't need Jake so much anymore. And he'd never really thought of himself as selfish until Jackie and Rose turned up, but as it turned out, he didn't like having to share.

thought: you might be noticing a recurring theme, which is that i really enjoy fics where jake is a bit of a bastard. this one is set around the trip to bad wolf bay & is very cute

sorry for the runner-up by carolinecrane

excerpt:

"Look, mate, I know it's different for you and me. You and Ricky…well, it was different, anyway."

"We got shot at a lot less," Jake says, and Mickey knows he's trying to be funny, but he doesn't feel much like laughing.

"Maybe that's your problem."

"You think I should get shot at more?"

thoughts: jake's "you think I should get shot at more?" joke to avoid discussing his own feelings is so canon to me that i did end up putting a reference to it into my own fic while editing a chapter recently. mickey's down bad in this fic, which is sometimes a challenge when you're stuck together in the back of a zeppelin. 10/10 very fun times

(carolinecrane has other v good jake/mickey oneshots, but these three are my favourites!)

Possibilities, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bananas by rosa_acicularis

excerpt:

“Suppose I don’t have to ask how it went last night, do I?” Pete Tyler said from the doorway. Unconsciously, both Mickey and Jake straightened in their chairs.

Rose gave him a wan smile. “He was an idiot.”

“I don’t doubt it,” Pete replied evenly as he walked to the coffeemaker, ceramic ‘World’s Best Dad’ mug in hand. Rose and Mickey exchanged an amused look; a man as powerful as Pete Tyler hardly needed to fetch his own coffee, much less travel the three floors down to Recovery and First Contact to get it. Yet two or three days a week he spent his five minutes of precious free time with a woman who was not his daughter, a man who was not her boyfriend, and a man who may (or may not) have been his boyfriend. Pete poured his coffee and sipped at it gingerly. “So,” he said, leaning back and resting his elbows on the counter just as Rose had done moments ago. “Should I be forming a taskforce to deal with an imminent invasion of alien fruit and veg?”

“No,” Mickey said.

“Maybe,” Rose said.

Pete looked to Jake, who shook his head. “I’m just sitting here, reading my paper. I am opinionless.”

“Spineless,” Mickey muttered, and Jake arched an eyebrow in his direction. Rose watched them and sighed inwardly; their epic saga of will-they-won’t-they had recently resolved itself (to neither man’s satisfaction) as they-will-but-just-the-once-because-apparently-they-are-both-idiots. They rarely let the tension interfere with their working camaraderie, but it was beginning to get under her skin nevertheless.

thoughts: genuinely one of my fave fics. rose-centric, takes a different path from journey's end. all the character relationships are spot-on and crack me up, including rose's little brother - HOLD ON I JUST FOUND OUT THAT THE AUTHOR HAS A BUNCH MORE DOCTOR WHO FICS, BRB I GOTTA GO READ THEM ALL RIGHT NOW

Interlude (The Space Between Breaths) by freefall

excerpt:

Later, when the fight is over and the wounds are bandaged, and it’s just you and Mickey again in the hull of an abandoned warehouse, the only light coming from some flickering candles and the only warmth from the slow heat of cheap gin in your stomach, is when he asks. ‘Course he asks, and you realize that somewhere along the way he had learned you just as well as you learned him (and how is that even fair when he didn’t have the advantage of knowing his parallel universe self, but he did it anyway. Bloody Mickey.)

thoughts: this fic fucking slaps. i don't read a lot of second-person stuff, but the second-person here has such a strong voice to it. short but sweet with a lot of that good good subtext.

a parisian sunset by @lesbiandonnanoble

excerpt:

Jake pulled his thermos out of his bag. In the middle of winter, with just a van and just the two of them, it really was the only source of warmth. It usually held some kind of tea - spiked, more often than not - or cider. He unscrewed the cap, which also functioned as the mug, and filled it up. He looked down at it, swirled the liquid around in the cup, and passed it to Mickey. “Cheers.” Mickey didn’t know what Jake wanted him to do. Logically, it was a drink for him. He should drink it. But there was only one cup, and Jake had been very hesitant to share anything with him insofar. Did Jake want to share it? “For me?” he asked. Jake laughed. “Yes, man. You look cold.”

thoughts: CUTE SHIT. i love a good jake-and-mickey-have-emotions-in-paris fic. and as someone who gets cold very easily, i'm obsessed with helping people get warm as an act of love.

so there we have it! the jake/mickey fics that have haunted my brain like my mind is a cursed cathedral!! my own fic is still a WIP - it's a long one, currently going through edits - but you can check out the beginnings of the first draft here if you want more. or i post about it with the my dw magnum opus tag, because i have had this fic rattling around in my brain for over a decade and was finally compelled to put it to paper.

happy reading! <3

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gabvinus · 2 years ago

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Ramble 6: The Rain Fight

Great okay so now I'm thinking about how we all know the "it's not my fault you don't like girls" line hurt on its own, yes. Like that clearly stings, it's mean and it's rude and it's kind of homophobic.

But what really gets me? Not the words. It's the fact that they come from Mike.

It's being able to pinpoint the realization, for Will, that his strongest safe space is gone. The person he trusted to always be a safe space for him no longer exists (from Will's perspective). "Crazy together" is gone. Will's now fully and truly crazy alone, just like he feared not even 9 months earlier. The door has shut.

It's the fact that Will probably remembered, on the bike home, that Mike's side of "crazy together" was linked to El, not to him. Never to him.

It's Will, 14 years old, realizing that he was so stupid to think it could last. To think that "crazy together" meant anything outside of momentary comfort and reassurance between friends.

It's Will likely realizing that even back then, even during the downward spiral to his lowest point, El must have been Mike's priority. That El was the one occupying Mike's thoughts, worrying him day and night. That Mike visited when Will was sick to be a good friend, and then most likely (from Will's now unreliable POV) sticking by him through the rest of it to make sure he didn't kill anyone important.

It's Will possibly thinking back to waking up to his mom, Jonathan, and goddamn Nancy after the exorcism, but no Mike. No, Mike was off risking his life to protect El from the demodogs. It's Will possibly coming to believe that Mike left him for El.

It's everything clicking for Will in one terrible, heart-rending moment. It's the idea that this could be the exact moment when his brain pieced everything together, that this is what convinced him that Mike could never and would never love him in the same way, that this is what lead to him becoming convinced him that he should be grateful for friendship at best and never push for anything more. It's the idea that this was the missing puzzle piece that pulled all the other little details together into the bigger message for Will.

It's the fact that Will carries this into season 4. We never really see him open up fully after season 3. He gets close, during the heart to hearts, but he doesn't explicitly attach himself to any of it. Everything he says is retractable, able to be explained away easily. It's seeing Will snap into defense mode, emotionally, around Mike...and never leave it. It's being able to pinpoint the moment that this change happens.

That's what gets me.

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