In Search of the (W)Right Fic (and a bit of a story)

Of note, I'm a youngster (hypothetically close to a quarter of a century, let's see how the universe treats me).

I used to spend some of my time scouring defunct newsgroups and LiveJournal blogs / communities. On my Wii. Interesting times, those were. Cannot complain, I discovered Teaspoon! And a few of my favourite writers too!

On one of the communities I poked around in (dedicated to two certain teachers ;) ), there was a fanfiction masterlist. Here it is, if you're interested.

There was a name on there I recognised (someone I follow on Twitter, a big Barbara fan; I didn't go on Twitter much, and now I certainly won't touch it!). Turns out, he wrote a long, long story about Barbara post-The Chase. As a Barbara fan (could you tell), I had to read it. I read everything on that list, but not that one.

But as is the nature of the internet, she giveth and then taketh away, and the website was gone. The Wayback Machine could only archive four chapters or so. I mentioned it to the author and asked if, maybe, he was interested in reposting it somewhere. Nothing came of it, he has his own original projects.

This was a few years ago. I won't lie, I kinda lost hope.

And then, poking around the Wayback Machine, and the_chestertons community, and some of the blogs of the regular posters there... I found another link to the same fic. All chapters archived.

I posted a rec for it on tardis_library. It's good.

It shall forever live in EPUB form on both my phone and my computer (even if I cannot read a full book on a computer, but you know, backup your stuff and all that).

Now, getting off-topic but keeping on topic at the same time: why didn't I save that one fic posted on tumblr dot com and tumblr dot com only that had Ian playing with some alien kids who were intrigued by the concept of hair. And Barbara thought it was adorable! Didn't I learn anything from the Angels mishap? Now the blog deactivated, the posts are lost...

Again, the internet giveth and taketh away.