(no subject)
A rainy, nasty Memorial Day weekend (soon we will all float away, I swear) has left me no choice but to spend much of the weekend - READING, yes, and hanging out online doing fannish things. Of course, I took time out to walk the poor little prisoner horse (who would be trapped in his stall anyway, due to the rain, even if he wasn't gimpy, and who is so far from "little" it isn't even funny) and on Saturday, to attend yet another absolutely delightful slashy party afternoon at merri_oddities. Well, I say "afternoon" but as usual it went into the wee hours. Many of the usual suspects were there, like lanning, gblvrderora, and pamelas, plus one or two new faces. smaragdgruen and lanchid missed it - they're at MediaWest! Gacked from derora: "I love slash nights. At meri_oddities's, they start in the afternoon and go to all hours, or sometimes all night. I love the conversation, the fellowship, the tolerance for quirks and kinks, the analysis of slash in all its glory. And then there's the pretty boys who eventually make their way to the TV after long discussions of who needs to be pimped in what fandom, and what the latest tape to make its way into the house is. Pure wallowing fun."
Couldn't agree more. I (ahem) am often the one who "needs" pimping in a variety of fandoms - I'm woefully ignorant when it comes to most TV shows, and pimping has proved to be a very effective tool for me (I may just be a slash slut at heart). It was an all-night DS pimping party at gblvr's that got me into my favoritist of favorite fandoms, DS. Now meri_oddities wants to pimp me in Pros, and I've also got a bunch of SH ep tapes from Flamingo just waiting . . . but the call of Call of the Wild is hard to resist . . . Of course, I seem to be ahead of the pack when it comes to HP, though it's a lot harder to pimp that - just gotta buckle down and read those books, imho. Oh, what a hard fate (not!)
We did spend some time discussing my massive and ever-growing HP document, and plans are underway, with help from a variety of more web-savvy friends (especially katyabaturinsky), to get me me own webpage and to get this info (as well as the similar TS and DS docs) online where it can do others some good (or else be totally ignored - who knows?) The response to the document, and the anal-ness evidenced therein, was, I am proud to state, gratifying and flattering and admiring - then again, I might have misread it - it might just as easily have been a kind of amazed and horrified pity/astonishment that anyone could be so compulsive. I'll opt to believe the former!
And now for some more stories:
If You Are Prepared, by Cybele (cybele): Wow. What to say about this one. It comes very highly recommended by many of the rec sites on my list (My list of HP rec sites). It is beautifully written and undeniably compelling. I loved it. I also hated it.
Let me explain more. It is my personal (and entirely unverified) theory that many fen, myself included, walk that fine knife-edge between general functionality/contentment with life and depression. That big ol' black hole is often too close for comfort, and though it might take a lot to tumble entirely over, it doesn't take much to tip the balance toward bleakness. Hence the appeal of slashy fanfic, which as a general rule is uplifting and, enjoyably if perhaps not entirely realistically, has happy endings.
cesperanza expressed my thoughts on this point pretty well when discussing katallison's story "End of the Road" back in February (Ces's journal entry). After much-deserved praise for the story Ces said:Anyway, since I recused myself as beta I've mainly been sort of keening over this story--you know, sitting in a corner, ashes on my head, kind of in a "Why, God, why?" place. Frankly speaking, I was afraid that Kat might actually persuade me of the complete unworkability of--well, not only the marriage of Ray K and Fraser, but of all marriages, all relationships--life itself, for that matter.
...
Kat's endings are more ambiguous; you can't really call them happy or unhappy because life, unlike fiction, doesn't just end at the end of a story, and in no other fanfic is that so clear as in Kat's. The End of the Road clearly isn't the end of the road; Fraser and RayK are both alive at the end of the story, and where there's life there's hope, for them if not for their relationship. They'll have good days and bad days, and you get the idea that lots of other neat and interesting things might happen to them--just not together. That part of their lives is over as surely as the television show is, as Fraser's time in Chicago is, as RayK's time as Ray Vecchio, is, etc.
I agree with this totally. And more, for me there is just enough depression and sadness and hopelessness in real life; I don't want it in my fantasy life, even aside from the issue whether it is an accurate portrayal of the characters. A story like Kat's, or like If You Are Prepared - I think especially because they are so well written - just drags me down and down and down; I have a hard time pulling myself out. Maybe it brings me too close to all my deepest darkest fears - that life is hopeless, that there is no love, that marriages and relationships and life itself are completely unworkable, that *everyone dies and everything ends*. I want desperately to believe this isn't so, or at least to forget it. The words that always come to my mind when I think about this are actually Matthew Arnold's, from Dover Beach, which has always been one of my absolute favorite poems:
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Okay, so maybe the world hath neither joy, nor love, nor light, but I don't really want to be reminded of it - and anyway, in the face of that maybe the one thing there is is to be true to one another - and that is what slash fic shows me, gives me.
So as Ces said re Kat's story, "when push comes to shove, I don't want it."
Well, all this applies equally to If You Are Prepared, imo. Again in Ces's words, "this is a great novel but really shitty escapism." In many ways this is to me the definitive Harry/Snape. Snape in particular is so amazingly well done (I'd say true to canon, but HP canon is so . . . well . . . shallow when it comes to deep characterization; it's hard to know whether this is canon Snape or not, but it certainly could be. In any case, this Snape is incredible). The story: in order to protect Harry the summer after GoF, Dumbledore isolates Harry and Snape in an undisclosed location so Snape can teach Harry various defensive skills. The forced isolation and togetherness of course causes evolution and development in their relationship, though certainly not in any kind of fluffy or easy way. It's an almost - well, not "almost" - acknowledgment of a link, an understanding, between them. The relationship grows in a halting, tortured, yet entirely realistic way, through that summer and the following years. Snape learns a deep and tragic secret about Harry's relationship with Voldemort - a secret that Harry himself does not learn for many years - that affects his every interaction with Harry thereon. Sex becomes part of the equation eventually, and though it is often difficult for me to read Snape with still-in-school Harry, this is one of those exceptions. It could be no other way; the story compels the conclusion that the relationship must develop in that way.
And, ultimately, like the secret, the story is tragic. Absolutely no happy endings here - and to be brutally honest (with myself I mean), a happy ending would have been an injustice to the story, it would have been copping out. The ending is realistic (insofar as HP can be realistic), inevitable, perfect and beautiful in a terrible way - but there is nothing happy about it, not in any way shape or form. It is the only piece of fanfic that has ever made me cry the way some of my most-loved favorite books often can. I kept thinking of the death of Diarmuid in Guy Gavriel Kay's Fionavar Tapestry, even though the stories are not at all similar. Why did he have to die? In real life the hero doesn't always live, and though the ones left behind continue on somehow, it is not happy.
One reader on the snapeslash Yahoo group (message # 18695) wrote: Words utterly fail me to describe this fic. "Sheer brilliance" are the first to come to mind, but really, I don't think they could quite convey quite how good this fic really is. This is the only story ever managing to make me read till four in the morning (knowing I had to get up less than four hours later), and quite simply the only fic managing to make me cry. Really cry. The characterisation, the subtleties . . . just - wow. When you read the first part, you're just thinking: excellent fic. By the second part it's just impossible to stop reading. By the third you can't really breathe properly anymore, and your heart is doing some weird flipflops in your chest. Utterly heart wrenching, it had me on the verge of tears and grinning like a fool at the same time more than once. It had me outright laughing at some of Severus' snide comments or thoughts more times than I can count. Simply the best fic and quite possibly the best story I've ever read. I've finished reading it over a week ago, and have read perhaps twenty other fanfics since, but I just can't shake this one. It keeps haunting me. If you've not read this one yet, well, you really have *no* idea what you're missing. Go read it!
Well. I think I agree (though not with the "best story I've ever read" part), but then again I almost wish I hadn't read this story, because it dragged me in and now it won't let me go - I can't get it out of my head, it haunts me, and though it is magnificent, beautiful, unforgettable, compelling, powerful, it is not an easy thing for me to carry around in my head. I spend lots of time and effort trying to avoid and suppress the feelings this story arouses. Yet at the same time I can't entirely regret reading it, because it is a rare and wonderful piece of work, and because sometimes it is good to feel, even if the feelings hurt (suppression and avoidance have an odd way of affecting all sorts of feelings, not just the ones one is attempting to suppress and avoid!) - it reminds us we are human. I'm torn. Again, it's great novel but really shitty escapism. Do with that what you will.
The Bodyguard, by Speranza: Okay, back now to more "standard" fanfic, if anything cesperanza does can possibly be called "standard." The Bodyguard was originally published in the Duet zine, many of the stories in which are now online (though it is still worth buying; it's a great zine with a bunch of other great stories, in a nice, smaller format). I adore many of Ces's stories, but this ranks right up there with my favorites, and I was re-reading it this weekend so I thought I'd take a moment to jot down my thoughts. In this story Fraser finds himself babysitting a word-famous Russian diva ballerina who defected to Canada in the early '80s. She's "hitting on" him relentlessly - basically harassing him - and he calls Ray somewhat desperately basically to come protect him from her advances. The story is characterized by Speranza's unique mix of funny, silly, deep, sweet, touching, and hot. Let's take each of these in turn:
Funny/Silly: One thing Speranza really brings to this fandom is humor, often colored by the silly whackiness that sometimes characterized the show. After Ray and Fraser's first night together, in the Consulate, they are rudely awakened by Olga banging on the door for Fraser. Fraser secretes Ray - where? - yes, of course, in the closet - "that figures," says Ray. And when Ray goes into the closet what does he find but Fraser's father, who wants to have the "traditional" talk with Ray about Ray's intentions toward his son. Plus he has a few other questions for Ray - like "you're not a vegetarian, are you?" And Fraser's reaction to Ray's deadpan statement - "look, your father gave me a cookie" - is classic: "Oh, my dear God." And Ray's absolutely hilarious but oh-so-true (and so very Ray) line upon seeing two male dancers holding hands in the restaurant: "So there you go, Fraser - we're just like those guys, except for the fact that we're nothing like those guys." "Point," gasps Fraser. Just classic.
Deep: One of the reasons I love this particular Speranza story is its depth. This story is really about oppression, and about how oppression puts people in the untenable position of having to lie, but then damns them for deception. There's some deep, painful, true stuff in there, like Ray musing on how nice it is to be kissing someone who cares about him instead of his previous experiences standing up, wasted, in the back of a bar or an alley: And it was sad, really - he was sad, they were sad, all the guys like him were sort of sad. All the guys who, for one reason or another, couldn't let go of the cover story, who told their moms and wives and girlfriends that they were just going for a drink, just going to watch the game, just gonna hang out with the boys - carefully omitting the part about doing the boys, electing not to mention the fact that sucking cock was a serious and sincere part of the night's entertainment.
Or Fraser, explaining that the very essence, the meaning,of oppression is to have no options, "Or having only a few options, all of them bad. Being forced to lie, only to be branded a liar. Needing to be secretive, and then being accused of deceit. What does admirable behavior even look like under such circumstances? The only respectable position seems to be one of self-denial - and that itself is a species of what you would call chickenshit, isn't it?"
There is no choice - either lie and be branded a liar, or practice self-denial, or be prepared to be open and risk "everything else that makes us who we are."
Sweet and Touching: But in the end, Speranza (thank God!) is all about happy endings - our boys transcend everything together (I love you, Speranza, for giving me this!). First they work together as a team to do the necessary lying to get them through in Chicago, and they do it with love and humor. Ray is touched and amazed that Fraser, of all people, will lie for him - that he is more important than Fraser's principles. And then they end up - kind of like in the show - in a mythical Canada, a "brand-new world, where he could be what he wanted, do what he wanted, and not have to make any explanations to anybody." They get to live Olga's classic Russian saying: Kazhdy drochit kak on khochet, or "Everyone fucks as they like." And they're happy. It's great.
Hot: Now, Speranza has said to me before that she's always thought she's a crummy (her words) sex scene writer. And more recently, in comments to her most recent story ("The Line) in the Curtain Challenge on ds_flashfiction, she says I'm NOT a great writer of sex scenes, I'm really not. I AM a pretty good orchestrator of dramatic climaxes, and mostly those two look similar enough if you squint, so I get away with it. But the sex scenes themselves are not particularly good, I don't think, and they'd be a helluva lot worse if I didn't have people like Resonant and Te (both great sex scene writers) in my Rolodex.
And I guess I see that, kinda. Yet I stand by my personal view. Whether due to her natural talent or her great betas (resonant8 is indeed one of the great sex scene writers of all time, imho), I love the vast majority of her sex scenes. And The Bodyguard is no different - in particular, the epilogue, after they've moved to Canada - that's some fantastic sex there, and not just a "dramatic climax." I find it sizzling, and good sex always really adds to my enjoyment of a slash story - it's one of the reasons I read slash. I like good, explicit smut!
So. Enough already. This one is an absolute winner, a keeper, a multi-star story. I've read it many many times already, and I have a strong feeling there are more re-readings in my future. Please please please, Speranza, keep writing this great meaty DS stuff!
Final note for today: I know I need more icons! I am icon-impaired!
Couldn't agree more. I (ahem) am often the one who "needs" pimping in a variety of fandoms - I'm woefully ignorant when it comes to most TV shows, and pimping has proved to be a very effective tool for me (I may just be a slash slut at heart). It was an all-night DS pimping party at gblvr's that got me into my favoritist of favorite fandoms, DS. Now meri_oddities wants to pimp me in Pros, and I've also got a bunch of SH ep tapes from Flamingo just waiting . . . but the call of Call of the Wild is hard to resist . . . Of course, I seem to be ahead of the pack when it comes to HP, though it's a lot harder to pimp that - just gotta buckle down and read those books, imho. Oh, what a hard fate (not!)
We did spend some time discussing my massive and ever-growing HP document, and plans are underway, with help from a variety of more web-savvy friends (especially katyabaturinsky), to get me me own webpage and to get this info (as well as the similar TS and DS docs) online where it can do others some good (or else be totally ignored - who knows?) The response to the document, and the anal-ness evidenced therein, was, I am proud to state, gratifying and flattering and admiring - then again, I might have misread it - it might just as easily have been a kind of amazed and horrified pity/astonishment that anyone could be so compulsive. I'll opt to believe the former!
And now for some more stories:
If You Are Prepared, by Cybele (cybele): Wow. What to say about this one. It comes very highly recommended by many of the rec sites on my list (My list of HP rec sites). It is beautifully written and undeniably compelling. I loved it. I also hated it.
Let me explain more. It is my personal (and entirely unverified) theory that many fen, myself included, walk that fine knife-edge between general functionality/contentment with life and depression. That big ol' black hole is often too close for comfort, and though it might take a lot to tumble entirely over, it doesn't take much to tip the balance toward bleakness. Hence the appeal of slashy fanfic, which as a general rule is uplifting and, enjoyably if perhaps not entirely realistically, has happy endings.
cesperanza expressed my thoughts on this point pretty well when discussing katallison's story "End of the Road" back in February (Ces's journal entry). After much-deserved praise for the story Ces said:Anyway, since I recused myself as beta I've mainly been sort of keening over this story--you know, sitting in a corner, ashes on my head, kind of in a "Why, God, why?" place. Frankly speaking, I was afraid that Kat might actually persuade me of the complete unworkability of--well, not only the marriage of Ray K and Fraser, but of all marriages, all relationships--life itself, for that matter.
...
Kat's endings are more ambiguous; you can't really call them happy or unhappy because life, unlike fiction, doesn't just end at the end of a story, and in no other fanfic is that so clear as in Kat's. The End of the Road clearly isn't the end of the road; Fraser and RayK are both alive at the end of the story, and where there's life there's hope, for them if not for their relationship. They'll have good days and bad days, and you get the idea that lots of other neat and interesting things might happen to them--just not together. That part of their lives is over as surely as the television show is, as Fraser's time in Chicago is, as RayK's time as Ray Vecchio, is, etc.
I agree with this totally. And more, for me there is just enough depression and sadness and hopelessness in real life; I don't want it in my fantasy life, even aside from the issue whether it is an accurate portrayal of the characters. A story like Kat's, or like If You Are Prepared - I think especially because they are so well written - just drags me down and down and down; I have a hard time pulling myself out. Maybe it brings me too close to all my deepest darkest fears - that life is hopeless, that there is no love, that marriages and relationships and life itself are completely unworkable, that *everyone dies and everything ends*. I want desperately to believe this isn't so, or at least to forget it. The words that always come to my mind when I think about this are actually Matthew Arnold's, from Dover Beach, which has always been one of my absolute favorite poems:
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Okay, so maybe the world hath neither joy, nor love, nor light, but I don't really want to be reminded of it - and anyway, in the face of that maybe the one thing there is is to be true to one another - and that is what slash fic shows me, gives me.
So as Ces said re Kat's story, "when push comes to shove, I don't want it."
Well, all this applies equally to If You Are Prepared, imo. Again in Ces's words, "this is a great novel but really shitty escapism." In many ways this is to me the definitive Harry/Snape. Snape in particular is so amazingly well done (I'd say true to canon, but HP canon is so . . . well . . . shallow when it comes to deep characterization; it's hard to know whether this is canon Snape or not, but it certainly could be. In any case, this Snape is incredible). The story: in order to protect Harry the summer after GoF, Dumbledore isolates Harry and Snape in an undisclosed location so Snape can teach Harry various defensive skills. The forced isolation and togetherness of course causes evolution and development in their relationship, though certainly not in any kind of fluffy or easy way. It's an almost - well, not "almost" - acknowledgment of a link, an understanding, between them. The relationship grows in a halting, tortured, yet entirely realistic way, through that summer and the following years. Snape learns a deep and tragic secret about Harry's relationship with Voldemort - a secret that Harry himself does not learn for many years - that affects his every interaction with Harry thereon. Sex becomes part of the equation eventually, and though it is often difficult for me to read Snape with still-in-school Harry, this is one of those exceptions. It could be no other way; the story compels the conclusion that the relationship must develop in that way.
And, ultimately, like the secret, the story is tragic. Absolutely no happy endings here - and to be brutally honest (with myself I mean), a happy ending would have been an injustice to the story, it would have been copping out. The ending is realistic (insofar as HP can be realistic), inevitable, perfect and beautiful in a terrible way - but there is nothing happy about it, not in any way shape or form. It is the only piece of fanfic that has ever made me cry the way some of my most-loved favorite books often can. I kept thinking of the death of Diarmuid in Guy Gavriel Kay's Fionavar Tapestry, even though the stories are not at all similar. Why did he have to die? In real life the hero doesn't always live, and though the ones left behind continue on somehow, it is not happy.
One reader on the snapeslash Yahoo group (message # 18695) wrote: Words utterly fail me to describe this fic. "Sheer brilliance" are the first to come to mind, but really, I don't think they could quite convey quite how good this fic really is. This is the only story ever managing to make me read till four in the morning (knowing I had to get up less than four hours later), and quite simply the only fic managing to make me cry. Really cry. The characterisation, the subtleties . . . just - wow. When you read the first part, you're just thinking: excellent fic. By the second part it's just impossible to stop reading. By the third you can't really breathe properly anymore, and your heart is doing some weird flipflops in your chest. Utterly heart wrenching, it had me on the verge of tears and grinning like a fool at the same time more than once. It had me outright laughing at some of Severus' snide comments or thoughts more times than I can count. Simply the best fic and quite possibly the best story I've ever read. I've finished reading it over a week ago, and have read perhaps twenty other fanfics since, but I just can't shake this one. It keeps haunting me. If you've not read this one yet, well, you really have *no* idea what you're missing. Go read it!
Well. I think I agree (though not with the "best story I've ever read" part), but then again I almost wish I hadn't read this story, because it dragged me in and now it won't let me go - I can't get it out of my head, it haunts me, and though it is magnificent, beautiful, unforgettable, compelling, powerful, it is not an easy thing for me to carry around in my head. I spend lots of time and effort trying to avoid and suppress the feelings this story arouses. Yet at the same time I can't entirely regret reading it, because it is a rare and wonderful piece of work, and because sometimes it is good to feel, even if the feelings hurt (suppression and avoidance have an odd way of affecting all sorts of feelings, not just the ones one is attempting to suppress and avoid!) - it reminds us we are human. I'm torn. Again, it's great novel but really shitty escapism. Do with that what you will.
The Bodyguard, by Speranza: Okay, back now to more "standard" fanfic, if anything cesperanza does can possibly be called "standard." The Bodyguard was originally published in the Duet zine, many of the stories in which are now online (though it is still worth buying; it's a great zine with a bunch of other great stories, in a nice, smaller format). I adore many of Ces's stories, but this ranks right up there with my favorites, and I was re-reading it this weekend so I thought I'd take a moment to jot down my thoughts. In this story Fraser finds himself babysitting a word-famous Russian diva ballerina who defected to Canada in the early '80s. She's "hitting on" him relentlessly - basically harassing him - and he calls Ray somewhat desperately basically to come protect him from her advances. The story is characterized by Speranza's unique mix of funny, silly, deep, sweet, touching, and hot. Let's take each of these in turn:
Funny/Silly: One thing Speranza really brings to this fandom is humor, often colored by the silly whackiness that sometimes characterized the show. After Ray and Fraser's first night together, in the Consulate, they are rudely awakened by Olga banging on the door for Fraser. Fraser secretes Ray - where? - yes, of course, in the closet - "that figures," says Ray. And when Ray goes into the closet what does he find but Fraser's father, who wants to have the "traditional" talk with Ray about Ray's intentions toward his son. Plus he has a few other questions for Ray - like "you're not a vegetarian, are you?" And Fraser's reaction to Ray's deadpan statement - "look, your father gave me a cookie" - is classic: "Oh, my dear God." And Ray's absolutely hilarious but oh-so-true (and so very Ray) line upon seeing two male dancers holding hands in the restaurant: "So there you go, Fraser - we're just like those guys, except for the fact that we're nothing like those guys." "Point," gasps Fraser. Just classic.
Deep: One of the reasons I love this particular Speranza story is its depth. This story is really about oppression, and about how oppression puts people in the untenable position of having to lie, but then damns them for deception. There's some deep, painful, true stuff in there, like Ray musing on how nice it is to be kissing someone who cares about him instead of his previous experiences standing up, wasted, in the back of a bar or an alley: And it was sad, really - he was sad, they were sad, all the guys like him were sort of sad. All the guys who, for one reason or another, couldn't let go of the cover story, who told their moms and wives and girlfriends that they were just going for a drink, just going to watch the game, just gonna hang out with the boys - carefully omitting the part about doing the boys, electing not to mention the fact that sucking cock was a serious and sincere part of the night's entertainment.
Or Fraser, explaining that the very essence, the meaning,of oppression is to have no options, "Or having only a few options, all of them bad. Being forced to lie, only to be branded a liar. Needing to be secretive, and then being accused of deceit. What does admirable behavior even look like under such circumstances? The only respectable position seems to be one of self-denial - and that itself is a species of what you would call chickenshit, isn't it?"
There is no choice - either lie and be branded a liar, or practice self-denial, or be prepared to be open and risk "everything else that makes us who we are."
Sweet and Touching: But in the end, Speranza (thank God!) is all about happy endings - our boys transcend everything together (I love you, Speranza, for giving me this!). First they work together as a team to do the necessary lying to get them through in Chicago, and they do it with love and humor. Ray is touched and amazed that Fraser, of all people, will lie for him - that he is more important than Fraser's principles. And then they end up - kind of like in the show - in a mythical Canada, a "brand-new world, where he could be what he wanted, do what he wanted, and not have to make any explanations to anybody." They get to live Olga's classic Russian saying: Kazhdy drochit kak on khochet, or "Everyone fucks as they like." And they're happy. It's great.
Hot: Now, Speranza has said to me before that she's always thought she's a crummy (her words) sex scene writer. And more recently, in comments to her most recent story ("The Line) in the Curtain Challenge on ds_flashfiction, she says I'm NOT a great writer of sex scenes, I'm really not. I AM a pretty good orchestrator of dramatic climaxes, and mostly those two look similar enough if you squint, so I get away with it. But the sex scenes themselves are not particularly good, I don't think, and they'd be a helluva lot worse if I didn't have people like Resonant and Te (both great sex scene writers) in my Rolodex.
And I guess I see that, kinda. Yet I stand by my personal view. Whether due to her natural talent or her great betas (resonant8 is indeed one of the great sex scene writers of all time, imho), I love the vast majority of her sex scenes. And The Bodyguard is no different - in particular, the epilogue, after they've moved to Canada - that's some fantastic sex there, and not just a "dramatic climax." I find it sizzling, and good sex always really adds to my enjoyment of a slash story - it's one of the reasons I read slash. I like good, explicit smut!
So. Enough already. This one is an absolute winner, a keeper, a multi-star story. I've read it many many times already, and I have a strong feeling there are more re-readings in my future. Please please please, Speranza, keep writing this great meaty DS stuff!
Final note for today: I know I need more icons! I am icon-impaired!