Fic: Helping Hands / Sweet Substitutions

[adams_ransom]

Title: Helping Hands / Sweet Substitutions
Author: tawg
Word count: ~3,400
Rating: PG
Pairings/characters: Sam/Castiel (mentions of past Castiel/Balthazar and Gabriel/Dean)
Notes: This fic is a 'missing scene' from princess_aleera's Burn (With a Wave of My Hand), which I strongly recommend you read (also, this takes place near the end of Burn, and is therefore

Comments

[tawg]

And I loved that it wasn't a prelude to sex
Having freed new feathers from that weird, waxy coating... it's not sexy. It's weird and your hands smell like bird and you get wing-dandruff everywhere and then you pull when you should squish and there's an awful beak vs. hand moment. Having a bird has just ruined wing kink for me.

And it becomes the same sort of suffocating feeling
Yessss. I found that really interesting/moving about Burn, because you have these MAJOR losses and then none of them really make any effort to move out of their pain, Sam even digs in to it deeper, and you just had the three of them living in a dead man's apartment, with Gabriel taking on a job at the hospital and filling in Balthazar's shoes there. And in the first half of the fic there's a refusal to accept that Sam and Cas are gone. Just like canon, these are not boys who understand letting go.

[whit_merule]

I adore fics that take into account the physicality of wings, and yes, pins. :) I was trying to do something like that in my Dean/Gabriel wingfic - that, and pointing out subtly that, hey, people, these aren't sexual appendages, and it'd be a bit weird for them to be innately sexy to a human, which seems to be so much of a trope. Impressive, beautiful, fascinating, yes; the angel's reaction to having them touched/explored, potentially sexy, just like a lover's reaction to one's careful exploration of the body generally; but the wings themselves and the feathers with them? Not on their own, not the first time you encountered them.

And, wings aside - the weight hanging behind this fic is beautiful, especially given it never actually becomes heavy in itself. Everything seems to be hoveirng sad and immense just off screen, like (as princess_aleera points out) the beloved family members that are surely just about to walk into the room but who never will again.

k, going to sleep now because my computer is saying 00:07 at me.

[tawg]

I agree with everything you've said here about wings and the trope of sexiness. And then Liz and I both have this head canon that Cas has just run out of fucks to give when it comes to his wings, so Cas has a lot of negative emotions tied up with them and, yeah, this Cas is not going to be shivering and melting the first time someone pokes a feather.

It was interesting writing a fic with characters who are in the thick of grieving while keeping it from being out-and-out angst.