Clothes Challenge, by halotolerant

[halotolerant]

When I saw the new challenge topic, this little idea attacked me and I wrote it as it came, like a sketch on napkin. It is random and small but indulges my love of dreaming up Gene's backstory...
Title: Make Do and Mend
Rating: Green Cortina
Pairing/Characters: Gene, Stuart
Words: ~500
Summary: 'In 1942, when Gene was a teenager but before teenagers had

Comments

[neuralclone]

Oh this is made of all kinds of wonderful. It gives us some real insight to Gene's background, and depicts the era he grew up in so well too.

[halotolerant]

Thank-you. I love hypothesising Gene's past - we've got 1929 till 1972 to work with, and that era offers one hell of a lot of scope! I'm glad you liked my forties depiction here.

[wolfy_writing]

Excellent use of telling detail. It's so realistic, and it says so much.

[halotolerant]

That's good to hear, thank-you!

[sytaxia]

Absolutely beautiful, in every way, and the bitterness that suffuses through the entire piece is just achingly real and shows so much about Gene... Wonderful fic!

[halotolerant]

Gene really fascinates me (if that wasn't obvious), and what I find so interesting is fandom's mostly continuing, unquestioned belief in him as a real person, not a product of Sam's imagination/comatose brain. I enjoyed writing this as a more angsty thing, but I'd love to try making him happy another time - he's like a characterisation sandbox! :D

[dorsetgirl]

fandom's mostly continuing, unquestioned belief in him as a real person.

I questioned it. For about five minutes after the infamous Matthew Graham "I wrote it and I know what it meant" post. And then I thought "Bollocks to that. Of course he's bloody real."

Gene is just too big, solid, gorgeous, deep and simply real(*) to be anything else. You just couldn't make him up (something wrong with that sentence *ignores*). If the entire world revolves around anyone, it's Gene, not Sam.

(And yes, I know you shouldn't use a word in its own description!)

[galacticowl]

What a beautifully written slice of Gene's life. That is lovely!

[halotolerant]

I'm glad you liked it, thanks for feeding back :D

[liquorishflame]

You've read Gene's mind. I don't know how, but you've done it.
[W]hen Gene was teenager and [he] still thought there were things he could fix. Thought that parts of life could be mended, altered and made to look new.
That's completly Gene. :)

[halotolerant]

I'm glad you think so! In my opinion, if ever a man had a broken hero complex, that's Gene (and then Sam comes and fixes it! and makes him 'drunk on meself' and...but that's later)