Title: To Rebuild a Life
Fandom: X-Men
Status: Abandoned
Length: 80k
Summary: Alex Summers didn't have the best relationship with his family. That was only to be expected, considering his parents couldn't stand mutants, and Alex is about as mutant as they come. The only bright spot had been his brother, Scott, but he had been dead for years. Or so Alex had thought, until the CIA called the X-Men for help with an illegal mutant experimentation lab run by Trask Industries.
Link: Ao3

A lab that just so happened to be holding an apparently-not-dead Scott Summers. And now, Alex doesn't care if he has to burn all of Trask Industries to the ground. He's getting his brother back.

(Or: The Summers brothers appear to share the God-given talent of blowing stuff up. People should really begin to take that as a warning not to mess with them.)

-​

This is abandoned being continued after a long break and in typical fashion, it had been abandoned just as things are getting really interesting. Still, what we have so far is a solid read, and there's a bit of a dearth of tightly focused fics in the X-Men fandom which seems more inclined to just shoot out several hundred side characters in place of developing one or two.

It's a novel look inside one of those mutant research/torture camps. The romance element is a bit forced, but still reasonable.

4/5

 

It looks like this updated just a few weeks ago, so it’s back in action.

 

Why would you take a space pirate and turn him into a generic mutant hater?

 

So I read this. It was decent enough that I read the whole thing, and I liked it well enough that I'll probably check out any updates if I notice them.

But ... there's nothing. Nothing that stands out. The author has a decent grasp on the language but not enough to avoid simple mistakes. They have a solid idea of a structure but not enough to not meander and extend more than necessary, they write okay character voices but not particularly engaging (and then there's the whole Winter Soldier ????? situation). They're not afraid to use some tropes, but not good enough to do so with any degree of delicacy or subtlety resulting in weird, cringy and/or immersion-breaking usaages of the language. The story has itself has progressed enough to draw my interest but not far enough to judge whether the author has pulled it or if they even have any solid idea of what they want to do.

There's just nothing particular about this to make it stand out.

A somewhat generous 3/5, just because I don't consider my time wasted.

 

Trask from the X-men movies(?), the dwarf building sentinels and trying to get Mystica's DNA. I do think you're just joking, however.
In any case is Riftwar any good?

 

I've never read Riftwar and I'm not joking. Alex's (and Scott's and Gabriel's) father is Christopher Summers known also as Corsair.

 

I see. I did not know about Corsair. Thank you for clarifying.