Heroic Measures

Thanks so much for the love for my latest story, Heroic Measures!  Whether you’re reading it here or on Archive of Our Own or Absolute Chaos, I appreciate your feedback!

I probably should have started posting this story sooner because I actually finished it last night!  As of two weeks ago, though, I was only on Chapter 7 and didn’t realize my end-of-story streak was about to begin.  I’m going to stick to the “one chapter a week” updating plan because it will give me some time to get further on the new novel I started so that hopefully I’ll be ready to start posting that when I’m done posting this one at the end of summer.  (Also, I’m a bit of a fanfic sadist who enjoys leaving cliffhangers at the end of chapters and making you guys wait a week to find out what happens next.  Bwahaha!)

It’s been fun writing such a throwback story.  Other than a few Brian one-shots I wrote twenty years ago, I’d never written a fanfic that takes place prior to 1999, so it was interesting writing the guys that young!  Of course, I like to keep things realistic, so the first thing I did when I got the idea for this story was to make a list of all the times I knew the Boys had been in Chicago and then correlate those with what was happening in ER at that time – what season it was, who was in the cast, what relationships and story arcs were going on, etc.  I narrowed my setting down to three possible time periods that I thought would work well, but I went with the fall of 1995 for a few reasons.  First, it was the only way to include all of the original ER cast members, and as much as I love some of the characters from the later seasons, I couldn’t imagine writing an ER fanfic without the OGs.  Second, it takes place during Season 2, which also features a couple of my favorite one-season supporting characters:  Shep the paramedic and Harper the med student.  I loved including them both in the story.  And finally, it was nice to be able to focus on the Boys and their relationship with each other before they found fame and started their own families.  I’m always looking for creative ways to keep the wives and kids out of my stories as much as realistically possible, so setting this one well before any of them had wives and kids was a perfect solution to that problem.  Plus, the fact that Nick and AJ were under eighteen made it more plausible that one or both of them would be treated by a certain pediatrician… but I’m getting ahead of myself there. 😉

Chapter 2 has been posted.  I hope you enjoy it!  I’ll be back next Thursday night with Chapter 3!