Sunshine After Rain (The Professionals story)
| Fanfiction | |
|---|---|
| Title: | Sunshine After Rain |
| Author(s): | Elspeth Leigh |
| Date(s): | 1999 |
| Length: | |
| Genre(s): | slash |
| Fandom(s): | The Professionals |
| Relationship(s): | Bodie/Doyle |
| External Links: | online here |
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Sunshine After Rain is a Bodie/Doyle story by Elspeth Leigh.
It was published in Motet #3 and is online.
Reactions and Reviews
This is a deathfic. Cowley, not Bodie and Doyle. In fact it's suicide. I'm not giving too much away as it is obvious from the first paragraph.Sunshine After Rain features an older, settled and together Bodie and Doyle who have left CI5, but are still in the 'business' as it were. Elspeth effectively shows the fallout from Cowley's suicide, how it affects Bodie and Doyle,both as a couple and individually.The emotions they go through feel real. Bodie and Doyle are apart for a lot of the story, but they call each other frequently and the conversations between them are so in character.Cowley's suicide also feels in character with the context she gives to it.A hard thing to pull off. Both Bodie and Doyle are how I imagine they would be. Older and wiser, but still recognisable. The sex is lovely too. An excellent story with a view on older lads I can believe in. [1]
I just read this recently, and though I prefer the lads as they are in the series, this is indeed a believeable future for them. It's such a wonderful story. [2]
Have always felt that Cowley was a very angry to do what he did to Bodie. The rest of the story is good.[3]
That's a difficult question if, like me, you love the Old Man and don't much enjoy pain, or hurt without comfort. The first reason and the less convincing is that I have announced I intended to focus my recs on the character of Cowley; I already presented him in various predicaments, only discarding stories where he is shown as ridiculous or evil. So, I couldn't avoid to pick at least a text where he is taken from our affection.So, this is another death story, and contrary to the previous one, not funny at all. The author doesn't play nice. All the cruelty and absurdity, even the sordid side of our mortal condition is confronted here, by the writer but, first, by his character, who has decided he won't let himself being passively engulfed in the wreckage of physical and mental decay. So, he dies as he has been living, like a warrior but in absolute loneliness. This kind of ending is only too likely for a man such as Cowley, more likely than the miracle of a belated love relationship, though I allow me to dream about possible miracles.
That's maybe the second and the main reason of my choice; it meets one of my deepest belief about our fate as human beings: Alone we were born, alone we will die, alone we have to live in between. And anything else is literature (something we are aware somehow: why all these stories about everlasting friendship and loyalty between mythic partners, if not to counteract in our mind the depressing effect left by the everyday's observations of continuous misunderstandings, abuses and deceptions between real lovers and friends?)
By the way, this consideration is perhaps why I so much like this character; he is for me the perfect personification of loneliness assumed with the highest degree of lucidity and dignity, "in the service of public interest".
There is a third reason: the writing. The author knows how to make her reader get a feeling of loss, of grief, of weariness, of helpless revolt before the tragic "irremediability" of certain events, without having to speak too loud.
If I have not dissuaded you to read the following text, well, that is you are a brave heart! Do it, however; it's worth the effort. [4]
This has always been a favorite; so glad you rec'd it. I agree in seeing Cowley's end as something that could easily happen, sort of the price he's paid for the choice he's made as far as what's the most important thing in his life. [5]
Thinking more about it, I realised that I had not a single word for Bodie and Doyle; All their behaviour in the story, their exchanges, including the sex scenes are mere reactions to the central fact of Cowley's demise. I sensed the title as unfitting; there is no sunshine after rain, only deep darkness... [6]
I get the impression that Bodie and Doyle's behaviour, their exchanges and especially the sex scenes are their sunshine, a reaffirmation of life and their importance to one another in the face of Cowley's death. And while his death may have been the catalyst, that's all it was. "Lived their lives and let him live his. Separate, but equal." So, ultimately, I think they were thinking more of how they had dodged that particular bullet in finding each other than that Cowley hadn't. [7]
Oh, you are right, of course, but that's precisely what I was meaning by "mere" reactions to Cowley's death and especially its conditions of loneliness and maybe despair (or simply the feeling of his inutility); the term of catalyser is very appropriate because the catalyser is what makes the chemical reaction possible without being affected by it (actually, it is affected, if I remember my lessons of chemistry correctly, but is reversed to its initial state at the end. It appears as the cenral part nonetheless, as is Cowley in the story and, for me, that was an illustration of this (gloomy) idea that, in life, loneliness is essential and love just a more or less effective remedy. [8]
I think this author writes the best "older Lads" stories out there. I love their relationship as she portrays them. Cowley's meticulous preparations for what he is about to do remind me of Ray's own thoroughness in Heat Trace.[9]
References
- ^ from a 2004 comment at Crack Van
- ^ from a 2004 comment at Crack Van
- ^ from a 2004 comment at Crack Van
- ^ from a 2006 comment at Crack Van
- ^ from a 2006 comment at Crack Van
- ^ from a 2006 comment at Crack Van
- ^ from a 2006 comment at Crack Van
- ^ from a 2006 comment at Crack Van
- ^ from a 2006 comment at Crack Van