Archived fic rec - Whatever a Moon Has Ever Meant

[sakura_no_miko]

Title: Whatever a Moon Has Always Meant

Author: hollycomb

Fandom: Star Trek (film, 2009)

Rating: NC-17

Pairing: Kirk/Sulu, Sulu/Chekov, Kirk/Chekov, Kirk/Sulu/Chekov

Warnings: explicit sex (gay), threesome, polyamory, character death (major and minor), grieving, depression/PTSD, suicidal/self-destructive behavior, discussion of drug abuse and overdose, alcoholism, sex addiction, character injury, imprisonment

Other notes: melodrama, haunting, family, relationship study, marriage

Length: 116k

Summary: When Chekov is presumed dead, Kirk devotes himself to helping Sulu heal, falling in love with him in the process. Years later, as Sulu is beginning to return Kirk’s feelings, Chekov shows up on the transport platform, the victim of a simple glitch, unaware than any time has passed.

 

 

PSA: Please don’t read this if you’re having a bad day.

So, for a long time, hollycomb and echoinautumn were a couple of my favorite Sulu/Chekov writers (I’d also nominate emiime, except s/he’s gone friends-only, so you can’t read the fic anymore). I read so, so much ST fic back in ‘09 and '10, and I expect that, come May, I’ll be back into it again. Anyway, both of them do these long, amazing AUs and romances and just, god, read everything they write.

That said, every single chapter of this is kind of hard to get through. It pulls you through the wringer, again and again and you keep looking at the chapter numbers going, “oh, god, I’m only in chapter 3? Of 12? how can this keep going?”

This has a warning list almost as long as my X-Men recs, and more angst than you can shake a stick at. I keep reading, and I keep adding more warnings.

Actually, that’s an interesting point: if you’re familiar with Star Trek lore at all, you’d know that Gene Roddenbery wrote TOS, and the early seasons of TNG, according to his own idealism. He wanted this future where we could explore and things were relatively peaceful. Now, granted, there was a lot of cultural influence on TOS, so you do get scenes that come off as sexist and otherwise awkward to a modern audience, but you could really see that Roddenberry wanted people who were like kirk and Spock and McCoy–studious, leaders, philosophers. Heck, boy genius Wesley Crusher was basically a Gary Stu for Roddenbury. Also, I remember that in City on the Edge of forever, Roddenberry vetoed a storyline where Kirk would have discovered a drug dealer on his ship, because he didn’t want to show things like that in hi future (instead we got McCoy accidentally hypo'ing himself).

But, once Roddenberry died, we started to get the later–and much more well-received–seasons of TNG, and DS9 went into some really dark territory with its storylines. Trek today is a very different animal. Reboot Kirk is dark and drunk and tormented. Writing XI fic can deal with dark themes like genocide, alcoholism and drug use by major characters, and parental abandonment, and it all works. Before you had to go mirror verse or pon farr madness to really get into dark themes. Dark fic existed in the TOS era. It just seems much easier to do now.

Anyway. So the first half of this is two really fucked up people keeping each other from dying. That’s the magic here–that so much of the story is the grief, and the long, hard slog towards finding some amount of closure, and then–then the ax drops, boom, and everything gets thrown into chaos again. There’s so much tearing down and rebuilding in this fic.

It’s a tough read, but a good one.

I’d also advise reading The Inexactitude of Loss for a slightly less angsty moving on story.

(Looking for more fic recs?)

Originally posted on tumblr on 4/27/13