Twice Again

Sentinel Fanfiction
Title:	Twice Again
Author(s):	Ysone
Date(s):	2003
Length:
Genre:	gen
Fandom:	The Sentinel
External Links:	online here
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Twice Again is a Sentinel story by Ysone.

It was published in The Best of Donna Gentry and is online.

Reactions and Reviews

If you spend enough time reading TS fic, sooner or later you'll run into Susan Foster's GDP alternate universe. Susan herself wrote 40 stories in it and she has graciously allowed other writers--slash and gen--to play in the universe as well. Ysone is one of them. In this world, sentinels are known and revered. Their skills are highly valued. However, their kind is scarce and, without a guide, they are doomed to madness. On the flip side, guides--for reasons whose historical beginnings no one can even remember--are seen as little more than parasites. Empathic and in need of shielding from strong emotions, they're viewed as weak and of little value, except for their ability to assist sentinels. Guides have virtually no rights and little freedom. They are usually identified as children, taken from their families and put into training. In the GDP universe, Blair is a guide who dodged that fate. His abilities didn't manifest until he was in college. There, he was able to link up with an underground movement that helped him hide what he was and escape his destiny, until one day he is caught and the nightmare begins. Susan's world is intricate with a cast of hundreds, huge emotions and a Blair who seemingly can't catch a break. I really enjoy her work, but prefer this take on the situation a bit more. It's subtler for one thing and the focus is more on Jim and Blair, rather than the crazy mixed-up world Susan's characters live in. In this story, Jim has been taking drugs to help him control his senses, but they're beginning to fail. His only choice is to find a guide to help him. However, he is unwilling, as he has already gone through the agony of one guide's death. Enter Blair, a W.O.L.F or failed guide, who has already lost one sentinel. He agrees to help Jim out for the short-term. Neither man expects a true friendship to grow, but it does. It's an interesting spin on how the boys got together, this time against all odds.

I could rec any one of Ysone’s wonderful stories, she’s probably my favourite gen writer, but this is the one I come back to again and again. It’s a tale of high angst (you’ll be seeing a lot of angst rec’d this month, I am a dreadful angst monkey); an AU in the bonding fic/ GDP type universe, but less physically brutal; there’s no forced bonding or enslavement of Guides in Ysone’s story.

Blair is a Guide who has been officially shunned and marked; his life in ruins and living on the street. He’s taken up by a desperate Jim who needs a temporary Guide, intending to get rid of Blair as soon as he can.

You can probably guess what happens next – there are few surprises in that respect, but this story is so very well written and Jim and Blair’s slowly developing relationship so beautifully portrayed – it’s just full to the brim with delicious angst and smarm and I just can’t rec this story too highly.

It's interesting to note that the author nearly abandoned this story because others had already been written along a similar theme. It's true that this kind of Sentinel AU -- where Sentinels and Guides are a well-known phenomenon, there is a permanent Sentinel-Guide bond, and Guides are often empaths -- is so popular as to almost form a sub-genre of its own (and maybe we can blame Susan Foster for that, since many writers claim her GDP universe as inspiration to a lesser or greater degree). However, everyone has their own take, and I'm glad Donna decided to go for it after all.

One thing I've noticed with my own reactions to such stories, is that while I don't think a Sentinel-Guide bond is canonical, and find it irritating when it's taken as a given in stories which are set in the canonical or a near-canonical universe, when I read stories which are clearly set out in a parallel universe where the Sentinel-Guide bond can be taken as one of the differences, it doesn't bother me at all, and I quite enjoy it (being a sucker for psi stuff as I am).

So, all that being said, what did I think of this story? I liked it. First of all, a good Jim and Blair, both with traumas in their pasts, brought together by necessity, subject to misunderstandings and pre-emptive self-defence. I liked this variation on the permanent Sentinel-Guide bond, which was more subtle and not so cut-and-dried as in other variations. Likewise I liked the description of Blair as being "a sensitive" which left things open for both more and less than an "empath" would have been.

Also big kudos for the characterisation of Megan, who came forward as a great supporting character, befriending Blair while still spitting sparks with Jim. (One little quibble, though: I don't see why there would naturally be more Sentinels in the USA than in Australia, and I sort of resent this maligning of my country...) I'll add a plus for the Deli owner, he was so nice, as well as different.

There were questions left open and things left unexplained, but that just leaves room for another story, don't it?