Lovely things

[maygra]

I am writing at a snail's pace and ultimately frustrated that it's taking me so long to finish my Sweet Charity fics - clinching at the finish line, as it were. *sigh*.

But other people, marvelous, clever people, do not have the same problem so life is still good.

From Barb, the irrepressible eighth_horizon, comes my birthday present, but lucky for you all, it's completely shareable. Salvation'verse, caught between Open Doors and Salvation (Which in my head starts when Sam and Sarah marry, but that's just me.)

Small Town, Big Hell (light NC17, Sam/Sarah/Dean) is an awesome case story even without the rest, but it's also the tale of how Sarah Blake came back into the boys' lives, not quite by accident. Wherein Dean is an awesome big brother, and Sam is so very Sam, and Sarah proves she was Winchester from the start even if she didn't get the last name until much later. For anyone who's read Finally Gets Home, this would be the much alluded to story that shows how and why Sarah is very much a match for both boys.

Barb and I have chatted about the backstory (and future stories) on and off for a couple of years, and she captures pretty much all of it in a lovely tale that really does explore all three of them, and why the fit is so right. The story is told from Dean and Sarah's POV, which suits the piece and the 'verse. The thing is, it's entirely possible Sarah, as we see her, (more on that in a moment) and Dean would have or could have been friends even if they both didn't love Sam so damn much.

For as brief a time as we saw Sarah in the series, she still stands out to me as one of the few female guest stars that was actually given more screen time to develop as a character than some of the other guests reacting to the monster of the week, and that without benefit of their being previous unseen backstory that could be relied upon for history, as with Cassie. She's not a hunter a la Jo, but she's brave and smart and insightful, seeing past Sam's rusty social skills and into the heart and fears of the man. We got to see a lot about Sam in all this too, possibly one of the few episodes where we get more than surface, the first time we see the weight of what all the deaths in Sam's past are costing him beyond the immediate grief. For me, Provenance was one of the most telling of Sam's stories, which we've seen so little of during most of S2 and S3. The fact that we get a lot of insight into Dean as well, into his thinking and most of all his relationship with Sam; well, there was just a lot of stuff going on in Provenance that still makes it one of my favorite episodes.

I think both Barb and I idealize Sarah a bit. There's an ever-present fear of turning her into some kind of uber-Mary Sue, but when I go back to the ep, I see a smart, sassy, competent and beautiful young woman who has a lot of heart and not a little intuition about these guys she meets by chance. She's obviously a woman of some education and not a little social and economic advantage. She didn't magically save the day, but she didn't back down either.

In the Salvation 'verse, she's often portrayed as the glue that holds the Winchester's together, although that description actually does her and them a disservice. She's not so much glue as the necessary patchwork, after so many years of damage, filling part of the void that Mary Winchester's death left in the hearts and souls of her men, a bridge between the life they know and the rest of the world. She is wife, sister, daughter to the Winchester men, first mother of the generation that follows.

She is perfect in so many ways, as we've written her. Unflappable and adjusting to be whoever needs what at the moment. She's a buffer between Sam and Dean when she needs to be, a necessary wedge in the dangerous line between adoration and obsession that Dean and Sam have for each other. I kind of feel like she should have some major flaw, but I can't find it -- not in the character as she was portrayed in the series, nor in what we've done with her since.

Most of the time, though, she's just the Sarah we saw -- the Sarah Sam gave up his grief over for at least a little bit. The woman Dean approved of and admired. The one they saved and didn't quite leave behind.

Small Town, Big Hell shows you why.

I make no bones about how much I adore Barb's writing; I love the tricksy twists of her brain, I seriously adore her command of dialogue and the inevitable humor she brings to even the most serious of stories. I truly love that amid a fandom given to fits and spurts of character wars, Barb gets the most primal things about Dean and Sam; that their adoration of each other is like another character, that it's edged with both wonderous love and terrible consequences. How Dean thinks Sam is the best and brightest shining star in the universe and how Sam struggles to live up to that while thinking that the universe would be a far, far poorer place, hardly worth caring about, without Dean in it. It's not a matter of whether one or the other of them deserves that level of unconditional and limitless love, it's just how it is and you can argue about it until the cows come home but it doesn't change anything.

Barb gets that at a fundamental level.




And if that isn't enough to make your day shiny, then destina's Amidst The Wars of Elements (PG, Dean/Sam) just might. This is a gorgeously evocative short piece, a fix for 3:16 - No Rest for the Wicked, in which Des manages to bring both the horror of the culmination of Dean's deal and the inevitability of Sam's hope together in a story that is painful and breathtaking. The details; tiny, pass-me-by details, are what clinches this story for me, a slow build to something both terrible and possible.

I've been a fan of Destina's writing for a good many years now, (not to mention the woman herself) but this story really illustrates why.

Destina gets the concept of subtle, and she gets the whole show don't tell aspect of narrative. One of the things Destina does really well is put nuance into small details. Be it elemental aspects like light and color or smell, the sound of creaking boards, or the faltering glitches of memory that most of us experience from time to time and worry on for a moment before moving on. She layers these things one over the other, near transparent and barely noticeable details that initially lend texture to her writing, but when taken as a whole point you along a path like stepping stones just barely under the surface of swiftly running water. You can make the crossing but you have to be careful where you step.

It's true of most of her work, and you end up paying close attention to the steps you take, so much so that when you finally look up from the path, you can be startled and delighted about where you end up, never having noticed what you were heading toward.

She's a consistently careful writer, which I am not, wherein each word or phrase carries a weight of it's own in a story, balancing it evenly across the layers of plot, taking you through the action and letting the emotion settle around you in ever more weighted layers.

Amidst The Wars of Elements does exactly that -- gives you hell and makes it feel like paradise.

Comments

[deirdre-c.livejournal.com]

I love reading your recs for fic and vids. Your insights and your ability to articulate them are phenomenal.