An Exorcist rec, and the Bletchley sequel

The Rare Male Slash challenge collection opened today, and I read an Exorcist Tomas/Marcus story that I loved:

Where True Love Burns, Desire (2706 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Exorcist (TV)
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Marcus Keane/Tomas Ortega
Characters: Marcus Keane, Tomas Ortega
Additional Tags: Pining, Repression, Visions, Secrets
Summary:

"He knows it," the demon murmurs. "See? He knows. But you don't, do you? He hasn't told you."

"Come on," Tomas says, raising his voice over it and making himself keep looking at Marcus—who's pale, mouth pressed into a thin flat line, barely meeting Tomas's eyes.

I particularly love the sharply-observed little details in Tomas' observations of Marcus. And the story is full of compassion and love, plus it is also hot. Win-win-win! \o/


And, there's something I forgot to mention from the last post, re: the weekend hangout with the_shoshanna:

We also watched the first episode of the new spinoff/sequel to The Bletchley Circle, the British show set in the 1950s, wherein crimes are solved by a group of underutilized women who had been codebreakers during WWII and then were firmly marginalized again after the war.

Anyway, this sequel is "The Bletchley Circle: San Francisco," and includes only the characters Jean and Millie (though they mention the others, which I like--people still exist in the universe even if we don't see them!), who end up going to San Francisco and meeting various U.S. women who help them willingly or unwillingly.

I really enjoyed it, and will keep watching. I mean, there's a mandatory buy-in at the beginning: they don't tell the police about their discovery of the murder pattern, because otherwise why would they have to go all the way to San Francisco to work on solving it themselves, and we need them to do that so we can have a show. I can totally believe that the police would have dismissed them, so I bought in pretty easily. Even if I did kind of wish we'd at least have had, you know, Jean hanging up the phone to say the cops had rolled their eyes and sent her away.

It's nice to see efforts at doing a period piece in San Francisco! I think California-wise, LA gets so much more of that sort of thing, so this is refreshing.

Also, as I told the_shoshanna, I really like the conscious evocation of the network of women, now including not just different nationalities but also different races, all doing what they can while all suffering from the patriarchy. They have bosses or husbands or other kinds of dudes in their lives making things harder in various ways, and they survive by helping each other.

Also, Nicholas Lea (Krycek on X-Files) showed up! The Smoking Man's disciple has become a Smoking Man of his own. :D