Bonding (Professionals story)

Bodie/Doyle Fanfiction
Title:	Bonding
Author(s):	Stew
Date(s):	May 1992
Length:
Genre:	Bodie/Doyle
Fandom:	The Professionals
External Links:
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Bonding is a Professionals Bodie/Doyle story by Stew.

It was printed in Concupiscence #2 and is online.

Reactions and Reviews

Unknown Date

Doyle pov; follows series 1 episodes. Doyle has always been an outsider and people often assume he's gay. He unwinds after a tense op by visiting his mother and telling her all the details (!); she is a good listener. At first D doesn't like Bodie but eventually they becomes friends despite their differences. They even do some male bonding over canasta! They have fairly rough casual sex a few times and once it is more gentle but each time B wants to pretend it never happened. D realizes he's in love with B. He goes to B's flat to tell him he loves him and propose a more committed relationship. B accepts but is much more inhibited in his articulation of feelings. Promise of things to come.

2023

This story was the subject of a group read at ci5hq: Reading Room; archive link. There is a long summary (with spoilers) for this story there.

It was good in that every author has a view on how their relationship should/would work. What I liked is that she didn't have them love or hate each other right off. Not that those types of stories aren't interesting, but a different take gives you some food for thought. I didn't feel it was an older story from the tone. I'm sure it was just me since I'm an older story myself. :)

I will say I think Doyle wants more of a declaration from Bodie than Bodie is willing to give at this time, and comes off a touch needy. But he's very human in this story, wanting something to hang on to in a difficult job and life. I can see Bodie being this wary. He's that way in canon a lot of the time. Even with Marikka he's a cold fish, with barely a ripple of romance (to me). He does protect his heart as we all would and do.

I enjoyed reading it. It wasn't a story I had to make myself continue. It flowed along and since I didn't realise it was set in the first part of the series, it ended! LOL! I did want to know what would happen in the future.

[...]

It wasn't horrible by any means. It just wasn't my view. I didn't mind reading it but it's not something I'd run to to reread or really recommend other than a different take on the lads. The writing was fine.

Do you think the use of the first series episodes as a framework for the

story was effective?

This was the most effective part of the story for me. It was a seamless mesh of story and episode. I truly liked that part. Which leads into :

How did you like this story?

I'm glad I reread it, was a long time ago when I was new into the fandom and I didin't care for the remoteness of Bodie or the insecurity of Doyle, and low and behold 20+ years later I still don't see that in my characters. I have read many stories that do use that as the characterizations, so it's not new or disliked, but for me, I don't see them that way.

The story idea was good, Doyle deciding that he would make friend with Bodie and does so. But the Doyle I see on the screen is not a misfit nor insecure. I'm glad writers explore different facets of the characters, but I'll wait another 20 years to reread again.

Doyle as a social misfit? Bodie as emotionally closed off? Different authors have explored these concepts, some better than others, but our mileage may vary. There is no one best way, so we read and reread though and keep on going back to those we draw most joy from.

Were you satisfied with the ending? Yes, it worked and fit to the story and they were together.

I very much appreciated how the episodes were so successfully blended into the story which grounded the story in canon. But I just don't see Doyle lacking social self-confidence to this degree. And I did like the gradual friendship development. Overall decent story. I enjoyed it.

I stopped reading after 33% because of Doyle. I can't see such an insecurity in him, is too much out of character for my taste.

[...]

There isn't always a 100% perfect story to enjoy reading. On the contrary, my mind is perfectly able to correct one or the other thing in a story. But there are some behaviours of the lads I can't cope with — this Doyle is one of that. Like you said to Krisser — He's so cocksure on screen it's hard to imagine.

How did you like this story?

Not my cup of tea I'm afraid, for various reasons as per below! It was competently written, so that wasn't a problem, but...

Did the characterisations ring true for you? Nope, I saw very little of my lads in here, and that was one part of my difficulty with the story.

Doyle as a social misfit? I don't get this characterisation of Doyle at all - I can't see anything in the episodes which leads me to think that Doyle is a social misfit. He's actually very social - completely comfortable with Bodie, from the first episode, or even if there's tension betwee them it's more alpha-male tension than Bodie-intimidates-and-confuses-me kind of tension. And he's very social with the other agents too, in fact I think we see that more so than for Bodie. We see Doyle chatting and friendly with Jax, and with Benny, and at the start of Close Quarters he's chatting with other agents. He greets people by name. As others have said, he's a very confident and cocksure bloke!

Bodie as emotionally closed off? No, I'm not seeing this either. Okay, he doesn't like to be kissed and cuddled in public, but that's not "emotionally closed off", that's just old-fashioned decorum. He pretends momentarily not to care as much as Doyle about questions around their assignments, but he tends to backtrack on that, and admit that Doyle has a point and that they should be caring. He's definitely not emotionally closed off when he's trying to look after Doyle in WtHCO, for instance, or Female Factor — he wants to make Doyle happy. In fact as soon as Doyle is distracted from their night with the girls at the start of FF, Bodie is all attention on him...And what about when he's upset about Fraser in Stakeout, even as quoted in this fic?

Do you think the use of the first series episodes as a framework for the story was effective? I'm never keen on stories that try to incorporate actual parts of the episodes, I'm afraid, because they have never yet matched with the way I see the episodes and characters, and this wasn't an exception. Everyone has their own interpretations of looks and words and moments, and when fanfic tries to tell me how I should be interpreting the eps, my wee brain rebels... *g* I can make fic fit around my interpretation of the eps, but not so much the other way around.

Also, I've seen the eps, and I can see them any time, and what I'm looking for in fic is something new...

Were you satisfied with the ending? I don't mind an ending being open to interpretation, but I must admit this still all seemed very one-sided...

So I'm afraid this just didn't work for me, and I ended up skimming to get to the end to some degree.

I usually enjoy Stew's work, but I didn't end up liking this fic very much. As others have complained, the characterizations didn't convince me. Doyle's, in particular, didn't ring true. At one point in the story he thinks, "yet another personal situation he had read wrong." Yet, if he were someone who could not read social cues, he could not be successful at undercover work, as he is shown to be in canon. This is the issue I have with the more socially clueless interpretations of Sherlock Holmes's character, as well.

As for Bodie, I guess it's hard to argue with the assertion that any given thing we see in the episodes is a front covering emotional detachment. ("He was beginning to suspect that the casual easy-going affection that subsisted between them simply hid Bodie’s indifference.") As byslantedlight said, though, Bodie did seem to be genuinely upset by Fraser's death in Stake Out, and there would be no benefit to faking that.

The plot was okay. I found the episodic structure a little hard to get caught up in, but I've liked similar set-ups in other stories, so it may have been that I just wasn't focusing well this week.