Remix authors are announced!!

[hope]

Yay! not sure if I'm supposed to/allowed to post it in my own lj, but eh! I wrote it. So:

Remix Title: Negative Space
Remix Author: angstslashhope
Original Story: Lacuna
Original Author: innie_darling
Rating: R
Pairings: Dean/Cassie, John/OFC

This was so damn fun to write. I was a pinchhitter; woke up at 8am to discover an email saying "help! remix something by innie_darling!" then hammered out these 5000+ words in about 12 hours, before hitting Derry up for a beta and sending it off. Phew!

And of course I had to take the approach I did, heh. In the original, innie_darling takes a closer look at Cassie & Dean's relationship. In my version, I hijack her 'verse to see what it looked like from John's perspective. (oh come ON. you KNOW me, of COURSE that's the angle I took.)

Anyhoo. Hurrah!

PS. anyone guess it was me?

Comments

[kimonkey7.livejournal.com]

MEEEP!

Sorry, but: *major icon love*

Sam is SO Ponyboy.

Yay!

[hope]

hee! yep :)

[innie_darling]

Can I just say that this was such a lovely surprise? I was sure that this story wouldn't be touched for the remix, since it's got the off-putting second-person narration, the unpopular Dean/Cassie pairing, and is so slow and meandering. And you went and turned all of those things into strengths for your version, and I'm just floored by it.

The background of Dean mourning Sam. YES! While I don't doubt the sincerity of Dean's love for Cassie, I tried to make it clear that it was also a case of him meeting her at the psychological moment. And he only says he loves her once she comes back.

The hand not pulling down on his wrist you grip in his hair, pushing the side of his head against your collarbone, not letting him turn again, not looking back. Oh, that hurtful physical intimacy!

When Dean wakes he doesn't speak, just moves his body in a slow surge upward . . . the brass amulet seems strangely upraised against his chest, like the rest of him's sinking into itself. This is such a sharp and painful picture. You are AMAZING.

Classical mythology jokes! You are unbelievable!

I really hadn't pictured Jill (who got much more backstory in "Field Trip") and John ever getting together - they're both too in love with their dead spouses for me to write it, but you made it work, made their familiarity a comfort.

Oh, you included the EMF meter! I love that part!

Is the girl Sammy's with Irene? Or did "Sunshine State" come out too late and it's just a coincidence?

Oh, the park scene. I cannot tell you how much love I have for your version of it, the way you chopped up the language to account for differing perceptions of cadences and speech patterns, the way John sees so much, and most of all for the way neither John nor Cassie can ever completely lay Dean bare. And it's the little things too: his face open and joyful, laughing, bruise-marred and a goddamn purple shirt, of all things and You can see the power below the skin in the bones of Dean's wrists and especially a challenge to put to the person Dean's shared his name with, as if he's given it to her keeping, to destroy or hold safe, power over both of them.

hair still sleep-tousled and fresh red bite marks on his throat below the fading bruise What a gorgeous picture.

Dean's standing by the water, his back to you, peering out over the surface of it. You take a breath, kick out quick and sharp, boot heel connecting to the vulnerable back of his knee, his leg buckling. And here is where I lost it, because Dean is thinking about this new life that's opening up before him (and what a perfect setting you've created for it), and John is destroying it as he thinks necessary. The whole sparring scene is so powerfully written.

Oh, Dean broaching the subject of sticking around - giving secondary reasons but not hiding his primary one - is so good!

"I want to get it," Dean says, voice low, a serrated edge to it and it doesn't break, is already broken. . . . He rocks a little under the touch, rocks into it. Oh, God, DEAN!

You tighten your grip, shake him a little, say instinctually, "Don't look back, okay?" And you've come so beautifully full circle.

Thank you so very much for this lovely fic!

[hope]

Yay!! I am so glad you like it. :)

I had read (and absolutely love) Sunshine State before this, yup - the timing in that respect was fine! I only got called upon for backup a week ago, and wrote it in a day, so yeah. I didn't have since July or whatever *g*

I ended up going with Lacuna because as much as I love Sunshine State, it's just so HUGE and would take me longer to get my thoughts into order with it, and I felt I remembered Lacuna well enough to remix it from when I first read it (obviously I didn't remember the details from reading "Field Trip", as I totally forgot you'd used Jill elsewhere also - whups!).

It was crazy and fun, writing it. I went through the story again and took a bunch of notes - sketching out a timeline for it, breaking down the scenes where there're interactions or references to interactions.

I'm still kind of in awe of how well it worked out, too - usually a story will have to stew for a long time before I feel I've got a solid mythology built up for it, but this one came together alright. Because the mythology came from Lacuna, I guess - when I went through with the note-taking I picked out and riffed on the few references here and there you'd made to classical mythology - of course, the Cassiopeia reference kind of informs the era, but the main mythology - the don't look back - I kind of picked up and wove in from the reference early in Lacuna - Cassie feeling like Orpheus with Eurydice behind him. But yeah, the classical mythology joke of Scylla and Charybdis and the whole "between a rock and a hard place" metaphor is relevant too :D

But moving on! *g* I hadn't envisaged Sam's girl as Irene, but i guess it fits, doesn't it? I kind of constructed the Sam/girl and John/Jill in there to play off the Dean/Cassie more than for their own sake within your broader universe (if I'd had more time to work on it, I would have gone back and re-read all your stuff in more detail, but alas it was not to be), I think of John/Jill especially in terms of the whole Cassie-threatening-to-replace-John-(and his quest) dynamic of it, which it kind of all had to centre around, with this POV.

Anyway, um. Yeah, I had lots of fun writing it. Part of the fun was pulling apart Lacuna, being delighted at all the clever little subtleties you'd put in there that I could then use to enrich the remix, rather than pulling too far away from the original :)

I am so, so glad you like it :D I'm in a big John-phase at the moment, and was hoping that it wasn't too much of a departure from the focus of the original! YAY.