Unforgotton, by Gil Hale (Rated PG-15)

[boogieshoes.livejournal.com]

hello, there!  right this way, find yourselves a comfortable seat.  my name is boogieshoes, and i'll be your driver for Magnificent 7 fandom for the month of April.  as we ride around the fandom this month, i hope to point out an even selection of gen and slash.  my personal bias is towards long, plotty case/ action fic and so the roads we drive on may get a little bit bumpy - please remember to wear your seatbelt.  still, perhaps you'll enjoy this first rec.


Fandom: The Magnificent 7 (ATF:AU)
Pairing: None/ Gen
Length: 431k
Author on LJ: unknown
Author Website: http://www.thebrowsery.us/gilhale/m7-toc.html

Why this must be read: Gil has a rightly deserved reputation in Mag7 fandom for well-constructed, highly polished writing, with tight plots and great characterization.  Many longer fics often get lost in their own plot, or find themselves with characters going further and further from the original conception.  This story, like all of Gil's stories, stays true to the characters, and true to the plot, and has a delightful twist at the end.  I especially like how the opening sequence is constructed: it focuses on a character that's been hospitalized in a psychiatric institution and has amnesia, and yet with no names or other seriously identifying details, one still gets a good sense of just who the character will turn out to be.  That, my friends, is talent.

N.B. Gil didn't rate this herself, so I based my rating on 1) language (not excessive, but more than the average 13yo can handle) and 2) difficult themes.  The themes aren't 'mature' in the usual sense, but can be considered historically complicated enough to require an older-than 13yo mind to understand.  My personal feeling is that NC-17 is too strong a rating for this fic, but I'll admit that my ideas of 'appropriate levels of violence' may need to be corrected for.

For a long time, the things he saw made no sense. It was like hearing words in a language he couldn't understand. His eyes registered objects, forms and movements but they meant nothing. Slowly—maybe very slowly, he had no idea of that either—concepts began to take shape. White. One day he woke, if it was sleep that had been holding his mind in blankness, and the word was there in his mind, giving shape to a thought: almost everything in his world was white. Time passed and the whiteness resolved into separate ideas: white walls; white sheets; people in white clothes.

Suddenly, a huge leap, he captured the word 'hospital' and that made a sort of sense, but left him with a vague feeling of puzzlement. Was he hurt? He didn't feel as if anything was painful, and food and bathroom breaks appeared to happen normally, though still in a distant and only half-comprehensible way.

One day, after more movement and meaningless sound from the white coats, he lay and stared at his hands. Tanned, calloused, an old scar on the ball of the thumb, they were a sharp contrast to the white sheets. He moved them idly. He had control of them, but they looked unfamiliar, a stranger's hands. He had no idea where the scar had come from or what his hands had once done.

That was the moment when he realised that he didn't know who he was. The fear and anger that erupted in him at the thought was the most real thing he'd felt in... forever. 

Go, read more, you know you want to.  

Full Story, or In parts...

-bs