Recurrence by Torch is part of my ongoing goal to bind at least a few works from the fandoms I've been in over the years. I will fully admit I was just kind of along for the ride in Star Wars prequel series fandom, back when The Phantom Menace came out. A good friend at the time fell hard for it, I have a general fondness and nostalgia for the original series, and it was one of the big slash ships of the day (by which I mean m/m slash, not horror slash) and everyone was writing it. It was a fun band wagon to jump on!
But this is not a fun fic.
The author's notes for this short series reads: "This is not a nice story. In fact, it's probably the least nice story I've ever written."
And it's precisely because it's not a nice story, and is a unflinching, horrible refutation to moral absolutism that it's stuck with me for more than twenty years. It fits into the genre of darkfic, and I think is well worth preserving as a piece of fandom history.
The series notes read "This is not a nice series. It deals with issues of abuse: abuse of trust, abuse of power, the sexual coercion of a very young person by a much older person, and the cyclic nature of bad choices. Please proceed with caution."
The total series is just under 6k words, and I've done a pamphlet bind for it, with a cardstock cover. The cover is lined with gel-plate printed acrylic paint on tissue (because I raided my wife's art stash again), and the cover image is a historical astronomy illustration smashed through some filters and flipped into a negative image. (Look, I CAN use GIMP, an open-source Photoshop alternative, I just never claimed to have any expertise or finess with it. My level of use is "oh, what does this menu do?" ninety percent of the time.)
This was actually one of my earlier fan binds, in April 2022. But I'd just bound and shared two X-Files fic also by torch, and decided to post a few other things in between... and then it languished in my drafts for, uh, two and a bit years.
Fun (slightly embarrassing) fact, the background for the photos is a much-abused cookie sheet that I really should replace one of these days.
(torch, I'm not sure if you're still active in fandom, but if so, I'm happy to make you a copy of this or share the digital files at any point!)