Entry tags:

fic commentary, remixes

Fic commentary: Rest Stop (I Knew You When Remix)

My remixee this year was merryish, someone whose name I'd seen around, but whose fic I'd never read. She writes both SPN and SGA, so that gave me two fandoms to choose from, and I didn't really have a preference. I think I read a couple SGA stories first, but nothing grabbed me (they were both missing scene types and seemed too connected to canon events to really dig my remixy fingers into).

So I ambled over to the SPN page and the first story I glanced at was Rest Stop - Near Leland, Mississippi. The summary caught my eye right away: In a trailer park halfway between Leland, Mississippi and Greenville, Dean takes a cut to the chest that damn near saws him in half.

Even before clicking on it, my mind was already swirling with ftm!Dean thoughts, especially the phrase "this isn't the only scar on Dean's chest". Of course any Dean could plausibly have scars on his chest or elsewhere, but I need only the tiniest in to go to the trans place with anyone, and I have been toying with writing ftm!Dean for quite a while now, so just the words "cut to the chest" were enough to make me think top surgery.

Then I read the story itself and I didn't know where or how I could fit it in. I also felt like, would this be just a copout? I've done one remix where I made someone trans, and I don't want that to be something that makes me lazy. Just add a tranny and tada, remix!

So I set it aside and read all her other SPN stories, and went back and read the rest of her SGA stories, and...I still had no other ideas. Nothing had grabbed me. Of course I could have poked further at any story and found something, I'm sure.

But instead I went back to Rest Stop and read it again. And again. And again. Thankfully it's short. XD

This time I picked up on something else I could use: the little girl in the beginning. zvi_likes_tv had a post recently about how she sees remixing, and while I didn't totally agree with everything, I liked the idea of leaving something out and adding something. I don't necessarily do that consciously, but looking back on all my remixes, it seems to hold true. And what I decided to leave out here was the Wincest. I'm not anti-Wincest in any way, but I felt it would take away from the story I wanted to tell.

And now, on to the story...

They'd had to kill the old lady. Sam isn't happy about that, but what can you do? As Dean is quick to point out, it looked like the demon possessing her'd kept her alive long past her sell-by date.

I dragged my feet forever on starting this, mainly because I wasn't sure how I wanted to write this scene. I needed to use the little girl, so I needed this scene, but I didn't want it to be too expositiony, nor did I want it to be something that seemed to be referring back to action in the original fic, rather than being complete in and of itself. I also, when I started writing it, didn't know exactly how I wanted to use the little girl, except in some sort of comparison to Dean. (I'd thought of actually having a flashback to a young Nadine protecting Sammy with a knife, but rejected it as unnecessary and too much work.)

Unrelatedly, I really liked the phrase "kept alive long past her sell-by-date", but it sounded too like Dean, and not Sam, so I just had Sam quote him.

Still, it's the easiest job they've had in months, pretty much in and out. Right up until a little girl comes flying out of the kitchen, knife in hand, and practically guts Dean before Sam can pull her off him.

"Lemme go!" she screeches, kicking and flailing. Sam's still got all his fingers when he finally gets the knife from her, but it's a close thing. "You better not hurt Brady!"

I can't remember who talked about remixing by taking the original story and retelling it the way you would tell the story (perhaps it was musesfool), but that's generally how I approach it. So I had the basics: demon-possessed babysitter, knife-wielding little girl, Dean getting attacked. But I rearranged them and changed them into something that better fit my purposes. So here, instead of being a foul-mouthed kid just trying to protect herself, I added in a little brother.

"What the fuck are you talking about?" Dean pants from the floor. He's got his hand pressed down over his chest, blood seeping out from under it, but he doesn't seem to be in imminent danger of bleeding to death.

The girl's glare falters, her gaze flickering to something behind Sam. He turns to look and she yells "Run, Brady!" at a wide-eyed boy standing in the kitchen doorway. The boy - presumably Brady - just shrinks back a bit.

"Hey," Sam says gently, "we're not gonna hurt you."

"Like hell we're not!"

That felt very Deanish to me.

"Shut up, Dean." Sam turns back to the girl. "Don't listen to him."

Once she's calmed down, it doesn't actually take long to convince her they're not murderers or kidnappers or demon-possessed themselves, and then it's just a matter of waiting for the kids' dad to get home and explaining to him why the babysitter's dead.

This actually probably took the most work. The action I needed to show was done, now how to wrap it up quickly without feeling rushed or sounding too expositiony. I think I found a good balance. Once I got that paragraph out, the rest of the story came pretty quickly, but God, this beginning took forever.

Dean's mostly stopped bleeding by the time they leave, but he's in no shape to drive, so Sam slides behind the wheel while Dean mutters to himself about bloodthirsty brats. Sam grins and shakes his head, and Dean snaps, "What?"

"She wasn't that bad," Sam says, turning the key in the ignition.

"She tried to kill me!"

"Maybe I just have a soft spot for overprotective big sisters."

And Dean just reaches over, turns up the stereo, and that's the end of that.

I originally had a line or two after Sam's dialogue about how he knew as soon as the words were out of his mouth that it was the wrong thing to say, but I like this much better. Show, don't tell!

Sam watches him out of the corner of his eye. His mouth is tight, his shoulders tense and hunched, and there's a sharpness, like you'd cut yourself if you tried to touch him. What he looks like is Nadine, which is something Sam's never actually thought before.

Someone commented on the fic that it could be read two ways: On a practical level it would have been easier for John, and safer for 'Dine, to haul around two little boys, and easier to forget her gender than to face all the ways one little girl was getting her head and her life messed up. There's actually two stories here, one for if Dine/Dean actually was a true transgendered person and her transformation was a triumph of psyche over biology, and a second for the rejection of her own biology and sexuality as another example of the self-loathing and self-sacrifice that has come to characterize Dean on the show.

Personally, while I do like the former scenario, that's not what I wanted to do here, and to me, the paragraph about Dean looking like Nadine should be a clue in the other direction. Sam remembers Nadine looking tense and "like you'd cut yourself if you tried to touch [her]" and yet that's not usually the way he sees Dean (in fact, this is the first time he's thought that). Dean in this universe is his canon self in terms of personality. Sure, he has problems and all, but he's not the unhappy (and often angry) sister Sam remembers.

They drive in silence, or as silent as you can get with the stereo blaring Metallica. When Sam pulls into a gas station and says, "I'm gonna get some bandages and stuff," Dean doesn't answer. He comes back with a couple of Red Bulls, a handful of candy bars, and some gauze and peroxide.

Dean makes a quip about the candy bars being older than Sam (quite possible from the looks of them), cracks open one of the Red Bulls and says, "What, not even a beer to dull the pain?" and it's like the whole thing never happened. Just like how Sam's supposed to forget he ever had a sister.

I thought about leaving that last line off, and I still wonder if it's maybe too tell-y.

"You've got your flask," Sam says absently.

The highway's nearly empty for the next twenty miles, no one passing through middle-of-nowhere Mississippi unless they have to. They're both of them quiet, though it's a comfortable silence this time. Sam wishes Dean would say something, puts in Nirvana just to hear Dean's bitching, but it doesn't keep his mind from wandering.

There is an episode where Dean bitches about Nirvana, isn't there? I seem to remember it, but I did a lot of searching and didn't come up with anything, so I had to trust my memory.

He pulls off at a rest area that's even more deserted than the highway. He helps Dean to one of the picnic benches, lets him take a couple swigs of whiskey and then gets him laid out on the table. He takes his pocket knife and slices Dean's shirt open, slices through the tight sports bra thing underneath. He'd ask how Dean can stand that in the summer like this, but Dean won't look at him. This'll just be another thing that never happened.

Up until this point I was actually still thinking about the original idea, with Dean having had top surgery. But then I got here and this just seemed the better route, partly because I think it would be a lot easier for Dean to get hormones than surgery (though I'm sure he could find a doctor somewhere who'd do it without going through all the usual shit).

The gash goes diagonally from his collarbone down across the curve of one breast. It's a surprise. Somehow he'd always thought Dean had managed to get surgery somewhere, wherever he got the hormones, maybe.

"She coulda done me a favor and cut 'em off."

Sam doesn't know what to say to that except "yeah". He pours peroxide over the cut and wipes it clean with one of the tattered edges of Dean's shirt, then starts sewing him up. A weird, detached part of his brain notes that he has no trouble thinking of Dean as him, even when he's up close and personal with his breasts.

But then thinking of Dean as his brother has never been a problem. A drunken phone call near the start of his sophomore year had given him plenty of time to get used to the thought and the internet had given him an idea of what to expect. He never saw the in-between. He just went away to college and then four years later, instead of a diploma, he had a brother.

Taking advantage of the whole, Sam's in his fourth year, but he talked to Dean two years ago thing to have that be when Dean told him. I haven't thought much about how it played out between John and Dean, but I'm kind of thinking he just started taking T and at some point after the fact told John, same as he did with Sam.

I have several different universes in my head where Dean is ftm, and most of them play out like this, with Sam not knowing before he left for college.

"Looks all right," he murmurs, dabbing some more peroxide over the wound. He sets the bottle down on the bench next to the gauze and the little sewing kit they keep in the glove compartment, then motions for Dean to scoot over a little.

He stretches out next to Dean, legs hanging over the edge, and they lie there in the sticky heat, slapping at mosquitoes. Dean's arm is pressed against his, hairy and sweaty and definitely a guy's arm.

It's probably a bad idea, but Sam says, "You're my brother."

"Duh."

"No, I mean-"

"That's enough, Sammy." Dean's voice is low, dangerous. Sam can feel him tense up.

Can you imagine trying to have a conversation about this with Dean? Not. Going. To. Happen.

"Just let me talk! I'm trying to fucking apologize!"

Sam pushes himself up and slides off the table. Behind him, he can hear Dean struggle to sit up, can hear him swear and stop trying, and maybe it's not fair to have this conversation now when Dean can't even get up by himself, but Sam doesn't care.

"What I said earlier. I'm sorry. I didn't mean..." He kicks a rock and watches it skitter across the pavement. "You're my brother, all right, but I can't just do a search and replace in my memories. I can't just erase eighteen years of my life..."

And this is the heart of the matter. It's not that Sam can't accept Dean as his brother. He can, in fact, do so very easily. But it's hard for him to know what to do with the past, and Dean certainly isn't keen to help him. I didn't mean for this to be a story about Sam and his struggle when I got the idea, but I'm really pleased with how it turned out.

There's no answer but the sound of Dean slapping away another mosquito. Eventually Sam gives up on ever getting one. He turns around, picks up the gauze, and helps Dean sit up. He pulls off the ruined shirt and sports bra thing - binder, he remembers now - and Dean silently holds up his arms as Sam starts wrapping the gauze around his chest.

Sam pulls off his own shirt and hands it to him, and Dean pulls it on with a grimace. He sways a little when he stands and Sam slides an arm around him, shoves the sewing kit in his pocket, and helps his brother to the car.

I wibbled at the end a lot, not sure whether to end it with Dean's silence or to have him say something, but I just couldn't think of something that fit well. That and I really like ending with "helps his brother to the car" (I don't use epithets often, usually not unless the POV character doesn't know the name of the other person, so the choice to do so here was very deliberate).

I think - I hope - it comes through that Dean isn't angry there at the end, still, but that he just doesn't have anything to say.

Oof, I think the commentary more than doubled the length of this thing. :p And right now, I can't remember if I had anything else to say or not, so...I'll just leave it here. Please feel free to ask any more questions. I'm always looking for an excuse to babble about my writing.