crack_van | Hush, here comes a whiz-bang, by azdak (PG)

Fandom: Lord Peter Wimsey
Pairing: Gen (Wimsey and Bunter)
Length: 2500 words
Author on LJ:

azdak
Author website: Azdak at AO3
Why this must be read:
The Great War and its aftermath is something of a sub-genre in Wimsey fandom. Canon gives us only tantalising glimpses of these crucial events in the lives of the main characters, but happily we have fanfic authors to step in and suggest what might have happened. This story by

azdak takes the key moment of Wimsey’s offer of a job to Bunter, made in what the Dowager Duchess of Denver refers to as a ‘tight spot’, and Wimsey’s burial in a shell-hole, and creates a taut and grimly atmospheric story with just the right amount of angst.

And when you’ve read this you can go and read the whole of the wonderful Oh, What a Lovely War series of which it is a part.

He hadn't heard the whiz this time. He'd been too busy shouting an order at young Phipps to get his sodding head down. The first he knew of it was the bang, and the ground shuddering beneath his feet, and then someone was yelling in his ear that a dugout had collapsed, five men buried, where were the spades - oh hell, where were the spades? – and then the metal biting into the earth, faster, faster. Every second counted, because you didn't have more than a few minutes to get a man out of a mudslide before he suffocated. If he hadn't already been pressed to death by the weight of the earth on him.

And one of them was Major Wimsey.

Read it at AO3 and LJ.