Body and Soul (Blake's 7 story)

Fanfiction
Title:	Body and Soul
Author(s):	Nova
Date(s):	1999
Length:
Genre:	slash
Fandom:	Blake's 7
External Links:	online here
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Body and Soul is a Avon/Blake story by Nova.

It was published in Dyad #19.

Reactions and Reviews

A wonderful angsty h/c piece with a happy ending, set post Gauda Prime. There are a lot of bad stories with that setting where Blake's reaction is "oh god poor Avon, what must it have done to him to try to shoot me?" but Nova has enough skill to show the reader Avon has been putting himself through hell. Other high points include the way Avon is still wonderfully in-character, even when practically suicidal; and Blake telling the assembled rebels who he's fallen for.

A post-Gauda Prime story with a positive ending, in which Blake and Avon realise their feelings for each other, sounds like something that's been done many times before, and so it has. But this is Nova doing it, which means one of the best writers in a fandom that has many good ones. It's an early one – she's a better writer now than she was then, which is saying something – and to my mind there are some dodgy minor plot details, but her command of character was always secure. This has alternating Blake/Avon viewpoints, and apart from getting the voices spot-on, she just so knows the characters that she can keep coming up with frighteningly accurate observations like this, in Avon's voice: "Although I do not fear physical pain, I am afraid of almost everything else. Betrayal. Death. Being alone. Being close to others."

One of the rare PGP fics in which Blake forgives Avon immediately. Both characters get their own first-person narratives, which sound very much like themselves all the way through, which is no easy feat. A wonderfully warm fic.