Favourite Fanfic Moments - More Joy Edition
As I just mentioned, it's More Joy Day! And you know what that means! Joyfulness! And posting a tiny snippet story doesn't seem sufficient. So, I thought I'd take a crack at listing some of my favorite moments from fanfic.
But I didn't come up with this idea. Waaaay back in 2005, octette made a list of her favourite moments in various dS stories. "Not my favorite fics, or the ones I read all the time," she wrote, "but just the moments that I replay in my head sometimes when I am sitting on the subway or driving for a long time or stopped at a red light or staring at the ceiling in my bedroom."
It's been quite a while since I revisited some of my favourite story moments in the dS fandom. I think, after a certain number of years, you start to feel like you've read everything twice, and your appreciation of truly great scenes fades a bit because they start to feel so familiar - comfortable, rather than inspiring or titillating or deeply meaningful. But here are the moments from dS stories that I haven't been able to stop thinking about in years. All are F/K, because it is the pairing of my heart.
My Top Ten Favourite Fanfic Moments
10. The easy, familiar morning sex (um, Fraser sliding his dick into Ray's coffee-hot mouth) in slidellra's now I've just come ashore. Sli gets bonus points for the fabulous concluding lines:
'Cause getting used to having what you always wanted didn't mean you didn't remember when you didn't have anything at all.
Yowza. That knocks my socks off every. Single. Time. The podfic is pretty damn awesome, too.
9. Um, basically everything in dsudis's Hawks and Hands, but the particular moment that sticks out in my mind is the great tenderness in the scene when Kowalski's bandage becomes unstuck in the night, and he wakes to find that he's bloodied the sheets. And Fraser is fine about it: he helps Ray rebandage his hands, and then he puts drops in Kowalski's eyes (because Kowalski slept with his contacts in) and makes him coffee. They're both so broken in the story, but Dira gives us little moments like those where we see how well a relationship between Fraser and Ray could work, if only they'd let it.
8. Family Portrait by Journey, where they're putting up the slide/swingset combo, and Fraser and Ray are underneath the slide, and there is this incredible spark between them:
Fraser moved to place the bolts in position. Ray's chest was slick and hot against his back and their combined scent was extremely powerful in the small space yet not unpleasant. Fraser was disconcerted. He knew he should be moving faster but part of him wanted to slow everything down and stay here in the moment, in this place with Ray's arms around him.
Shockingly, he felt Ray nuzzle his hair. Surprised, he half-turned to meet Ray's eyes.
"Sorry about that." Ray's face was red with heat and/or embarrassment. "You know how it is. You get your hands full and suddenly your nose starts to ...." His voice trailed off and he stopped. Time seemed to stand still.
"Starts to what?" Fraser's voice was hardly above a whisper.
"Itch," Ray finished.
"Oh," said Fraser, wondering what they were talking about. Their smell and Ray's eyes and the feel of Ray's sweaty skin sliding against his own was.... disconcerting.
"So, you think you could..."
"Could what, Ray?" Fraser felt very strange.
".......maybe finish up here? My arms aren't going to last much longer."
"Oh. Right you are." Fraser whipped back around, slid the last of the screws in and tightened the bolts as much as possible. "All right, let go and let's see if it holds."
That is some goooood UST, right there. *points*
7. When Fraser shows Ray the cherry-stem tying trick in arrow00's One Small Thing. Yowza. Determined!Fraser is truly a thing of beauty.
6. I can't pick just one moment from How Ray Got His Groove Back by Bone and Aristide, so I'll choose two. The first is the so-hilarious-yet-so-wrong moment when Ray says he'd like to fuck Fraser but, unfortunately, makes this statement right when he's within, ah, spurting distance, and ends up with an eyeful of SOMETHING. It's really disgusting but absolutely true to life, the indignities of sex, and the vagaries of unintentional disaster.
My second pick from this story (which also takes top place as the best damn NC-17 story in the world) comes when Ray forces Fraser's confession: Fraser let a woman...with her fingers...and he's only ever loved people he couldn't have. Oh, Fraser. You w00bie.
5. troyswann's devastating Dysmas, when Ray wakes up to discover that Fraser was never really in the room with him.
Snow cascades into the room from the knee-high drift. The world is somehow both sharply pristine and shapeless after the storm, and the parking lot is a perfect blank of even white, except for the generally Riviera-shaped mound sitting in a puddle of lavender shadow near the diner. No footprints leading away from Number Three. Not one.
Ray turns around and glares back into the room. No windows in the back but the tiny one in the bathroom, and Ray was in there and nobody went by him. He turns around again, with his eyes closed, counts to three to give the universe a chance to shape up and fly right, and then opens them. Still no footprints. He's standing there with his mouth hanging open when the phone starts ringing. It rings five times before Ray comes unstuck and goes to snatch up the receiver.
It's a tossup between this part of the story and the ending, after Victoria has been apprehended and Fraser's (and Ray's) final duty has been discharged. troyswann gives us an image of Fraser standing in a field of fresh white snow, his tunic bright against the colourless landscape, and he's freshly shaven and cleanly pressed and more alive in death than Ray Vecchio ever could have expected. It's a heartbreaking moment, but a good one.
4. In katallison's Heavy Bag, when Kowalski and Fraser tour their victim's apartment, and I've always admired the way Kat shows us (through Ray's POV) what Fraser's worst nightmare looks like. Fraser's reactions in that scene, and Ray's, are fantastic, and what happens directly afterwards is even better.
3. Ray and Stella's wedding in Sibylla ti theleis, by Hth. That image of Vecchio, battered and wounded and in so much pain he can hardly stand, is a damn moving piece of writing. Stella's tenderness towards him in the short sequence that follows made me start to love love their imperfect yet honest relationship.
Ray cried. He started on "Dearly beloved" and didn't have his shit together until sometime around "I thee wed." After it was finished, when their six guests retired to Ray's house for dinner, Ray and Stella stayed behind, sitting in the back row of the wooden pews. He held her hand in both of his and bowed his head over them while she stroked his back without saying a word, and he cried more. He'd only been out of the hospital for ten days, and it had been hell to stand up straight even through a short service like that; he had pain blossoming up from something soft and half-mended in his gut all the way through his chest, and he felt like something a lot less than a whole human being, at a time when it would've been nice to feel like a man.
2. The letters spelled out in instant coffee the snow in dsudis's Exposures:
WON'T MAKE IT
WITHOUT HIM
SORRY
And, for a happier memory from that same story, the picture tacked up on the wall in the 2-7, the one that stays there for years. I know this is possibly the saddest fucking story in the fandom (aside from Kat's End of the Road) but thinking about how happy Fraser and Kowalski were for those brief months on the trip still chokes me up.
1. The moment when Fraser said, "Ray," and he was in resonant8's Broadway Hotel.
Honourable Mentions:
[And I'm starting and ending with the numerical stories, because that's how my brain works]
1. Barbara Kowalski figures it out in zellieh's Eight Weeks.
2. While on vacation in Europe, Kowalski and Fraser come face-to-face with the Last Supper in cappella's Thirty Days in Europe.
3. Fraser and Kowalski let Vecchio feel loved and accepted, if only for a single night, in j_s_cavalcante's Duet, with Brief Interlude for Trio.
4. Kowalski solves a tough case and comes home to Fraser and a massage in secretlybronte's Our Fair Share of Abuse.
5. Fraser comes close to striking a bargain with a stone-cold killer in brigantine1's dS/Men with Guns crossover Out from Under.
6. Poor, broken Kowalski fighting his way up that icy hill to Fraser in Anonymous Co's Busted.
7. The last time they make love in ignazwisdom's Great White Nothing.
8. Kowalski discovers he's Fraser's one man in a thousand in keerawa's Death Defying
9. We discover that this is the posting Fraser wanted in spuffyduds's After
and, because you can't do this kind of list without mentioning cesperanza at least once...
10. Tuesday finally passes in Ces' Eight Sessions.
There! So, in honour of More Joy Day, why don't you tell us about your own Favourite Fanfic Moments?
But I didn't come up with this idea. Waaaay back in 2005, octette made a list of her favourite moments in various dS stories. "Not my favorite fics, or the ones I read all the time," she wrote, "but just the moments that I replay in my head sometimes when I am sitting on the subway or driving for a long time or stopped at a red light or staring at the ceiling in my bedroom."
It's been quite a while since I revisited some of my favourite story moments in the dS fandom. I think, after a certain number of years, you start to feel like you've read everything twice, and your appreciation of truly great scenes fades a bit because they start to feel so familiar - comfortable, rather than inspiring or titillating or deeply meaningful. But here are the moments from dS stories that I haven't been able to stop thinking about in years. All are F/K, because it is the pairing of my heart.
My Top Ten Favourite Fanfic Moments
10. The easy, familiar morning sex (um, Fraser sliding his dick into Ray's coffee-hot mouth) in slidellra's now I've just come ashore. Sli gets bonus points for the fabulous concluding lines:
'Cause getting used to having what you always wanted didn't mean you didn't remember when you didn't have anything at all.
Yowza. That knocks my socks off every. Single. Time. The podfic is pretty damn awesome, too.
9. Um, basically everything in dsudis's Hawks and Hands, but the particular moment that sticks out in my mind is the great tenderness in the scene when Kowalski's bandage becomes unstuck in the night, and he wakes to find that he's bloodied the sheets. And Fraser is fine about it: he helps Ray rebandage his hands, and then he puts drops in Kowalski's eyes (because Kowalski slept with his contacts in) and makes him coffee. They're both so broken in the story, but Dira gives us little moments like those where we see how well a relationship between Fraser and Ray could work, if only they'd let it.
8. Family Portrait by Journey, where they're putting up the slide/swingset combo, and Fraser and Ray are underneath the slide, and there is this incredible spark between them:
Fraser moved to place the bolts in position. Ray's chest was slick and hot against his back and their combined scent was extremely powerful in the small space yet not unpleasant. Fraser was disconcerted. He knew he should be moving faster but part of him wanted to slow everything down and stay here in the moment, in this place with Ray's arms around him.
Shockingly, he felt Ray nuzzle his hair. Surprised, he half-turned to meet Ray's eyes.
"Sorry about that." Ray's face was red with heat and/or embarrassment. "You know how it is. You get your hands full and suddenly your nose starts to ...." His voice trailed off and he stopped. Time seemed to stand still.
"Starts to what?" Fraser's voice was hardly above a whisper.
"Itch," Ray finished.
"Oh," said Fraser, wondering what they were talking about. Their smell and Ray's eyes and the feel of Ray's sweaty skin sliding against his own was.... disconcerting.
"So, you think you could..."
"Could what, Ray?" Fraser felt very strange.
".......maybe finish up here? My arms aren't going to last much longer."
"Oh. Right you are." Fraser whipped back around, slid the last of the screws in and tightened the bolts as much as possible. "All right, let go and let's see if it holds."
That is some goooood UST, right there. *points*
7. When Fraser shows Ray the cherry-stem tying trick in arrow00's One Small Thing. Yowza. Determined!Fraser is truly a thing of beauty.
6. I can't pick just one moment from How Ray Got His Groove Back by Bone and Aristide, so I'll choose two. The first is the so-hilarious-yet-so-wrong moment when Ray says he'd like to fuck Fraser but, unfortunately, makes this statement right when he's within, ah, spurting distance, and ends up with an eyeful of SOMETHING. It's really disgusting but absolutely true to life, the indignities of sex, and the vagaries of unintentional disaster.
My second pick from this story (which also takes top place as the best damn NC-17 story in the world) comes when Ray forces Fraser's confession: Fraser let a woman...with her fingers...and he's only ever loved people he couldn't have. Oh, Fraser. You w00bie.
5. troyswann's devastating Dysmas, when Ray wakes up to discover that Fraser was never really in the room with him.
Snow cascades into the room from the knee-high drift. The world is somehow both sharply pristine and shapeless after the storm, and the parking lot is a perfect blank of even white, except for the generally Riviera-shaped mound sitting in a puddle of lavender shadow near the diner. No footprints leading away from Number Three. Not one.
Ray turns around and glares back into the room. No windows in the back but the tiny one in the bathroom, and Ray was in there and nobody went by him. He turns around again, with his eyes closed, counts to three to give the universe a chance to shape up and fly right, and then opens them. Still no footprints. He's standing there with his mouth hanging open when the phone starts ringing. It rings five times before Ray comes unstuck and goes to snatch up the receiver.
It's a tossup between this part of the story and the ending, after Victoria has been apprehended and Fraser's (and Ray's) final duty has been discharged. troyswann gives us an image of Fraser standing in a field of fresh white snow, his tunic bright against the colourless landscape, and he's freshly shaven and cleanly pressed and more alive in death than Ray Vecchio ever could have expected. It's a heartbreaking moment, but a good one.
4. In katallison's Heavy Bag, when Kowalski and Fraser tour their victim's apartment, and I've always admired the way Kat shows us (through Ray's POV) what Fraser's worst nightmare looks like. Fraser's reactions in that scene, and Ray's, are fantastic, and what happens directly afterwards is even better.
3. Ray and Stella's wedding in Sibylla ti theleis, by Hth. That image of Vecchio, battered and wounded and in so much pain he can hardly stand, is a damn moving piece of writing. Stella's tenderness towards him in the short sequence that follows made me start to love love their imperfect yet honest relationship.
Ray cried. He started on "Dearly beloved" and didn't have his shit together until sometime around "I thee wed." After it was finished, when their six guests retired to Ray's house for dinner, Ray and Stella stayed behind, sitting in the back row of the wooden pews. He held her hand in both of his and bowed his head over them while she stroked his back without saying a word, and he cried more. He'd only been out of the hospital for ten days, and it had been hell to stand up straight even through a short service like that; he had pain blossoming up from something soft and half-mended in his gut all the way through his chest, and he felt like something a lot less than a whole human being, at a time when it would've been nice to feel like a man.
2. The letters spelled out in instant coffee the snow in dsudis's Exposures:
WON'T MAKE IT
WITHOUT HIM
SORRY
And, for a happier memory from that same story, the picture tacked up on the wall in the 2-7, the one that stays there for years. I know this is possibly the saddest fucking story in the fandom (aside from Kat's End of the Road) but thinking about how happy Fraser and Kowalski were for those brief months on the trip still chokes me up.
1. The moment when Fraser said, "Ray," and he was in resonant8's Broadway Hotel.
Honourable Mentions:
[And I'm starting and ending with the numerical stories, because that's how my brain works]
1. Barbara Kowalski figures it out in zellieh's Eight Weeks.
2. While on vacation in Europe, Kowalski and Fraser come face-to-face with the Last Supper in cappella's Thirty Days in Europe.
3. Fraser and Kowalski let Vecchio feel loved and accepted, if only for a single night, in j_s_cavalcante's Duet, with Brief Interlude for Trio.
4. Kowalski solves a tough case and comes home to Fraser and a massage in secretlybronte's Our Fair Share of Abuse.
5. Fraser comes close to striking a bargain with a stone-cold killer in brigantine1's dS/Men with Guns crossover Out from Under.
6. Poor, broken Kowalski fighting his way up that icy hill to Fraser in Anonymous Co's Busted.
7. The last time they make love in ignazwisdom's Great White Nothing.
8. Kowalski discovers he's Fraser's one man in a thousand in keerawa's Death Defying
9. We discover that this is the posting Fraser wanted in spuffyduds's After
and, because you can't do this kind of list without mentioning cesperanza at least once...
10. Tuesday finally passes in Ces' Eight Sessions.
There! So, in honour of More Joy Day, why don't you tell us about your own Favourite Fanfic Moments?