#i tried to parallel the vibes w the excerpts like

[dallonwrites]

Lover Boy But It's The Camp Nano Intro?

Sometimes Beau thinks his heart must be made out of the most fragile, feebly tissue paper – the dainty pink stuff pushed into the bottom of a Valentines giftbag, the biodegradable kind that immediately crumbles when it’s met with water or trash compost or an uncaring hand. But it’s not his fault he’s a hopeless romantic.

genre: adult litfic

setting: san francisco, 1980s

deals with: grief and loss, queer history + the AIDS crisis, sex and the body, terminal illness and caretaking, being a hopeless romantic but like for all kinds of love, platonic love, friendship when one of them is ill and knows they will likely die, disability and how caretaking can reshape dynamics

summary: It's about love, babey! Beau tries to navigate all the different types of love in his life -- romantic, sexual, platonic, familial, communal, self -- as he leans into relationships, even the unhealthy ones, to try to cope with the death of his best friend Bobby, who Beau took care of whilst he was sick for two years. Told with a dual timeline showing those two years as Beau processes it. It's about being messy and confused and trying to understand how to move forward when the biggest part of your life is now gone. It's about being in love with your best friend but like platonically and also your best friend is dead. It's about queer sex and grief and caretaking and the AIDS crisis. Beau is also obsessed with horror movies and is definitely autistic but doesn't know it. Bobby loved volcanoes and mountains, acrylic painting, David Cronenberg movies and also The Muppets (his fave was Gonzo btw). If you want to know more I have a more detailed WIP intro and also the tag where I post way too long excerpts!

status: 16,391 words into the first draft, but that's been writing whenever/whatever I want rather than a consistent routine

my goal?: get a consistent drafting routine LOL. Word count wise I'd like 15k to basically double it, but we will see! Would love to write everyday at least though.

I haven't done taglists in a while buuuut if people are doing camp nano taglists? That could be fun? This story is so sad but sometimes it is so silly and fun. If you like stories where the grief and joy hold hands then this might be for you !!

What Beau remembers: The quiet when, for a long moment, Bobby didn’t speak. Then, a whisper. “Today wasn’t the day.” And Beau understood what he meant, a painful but deep knowing -- how they still weren't ready, whenever they talked about it, to say the word die. “No, today wasn’t the day.” Bobby, quieter. “And tomorrow. Tomorrow won’t be the day either.” “I don’t think it will.” Beau thinks, at this moment, that he kissed the top of Bobby’s head, or he whispered one into his hair, pressed his cheek into it. At least, that’s how he remembers, or how he wants to. “I don’t think it will be the day for a while.” What Beau remembers: Bobby, still quiet, his breathing slowed. But still awake. How he moved closer, and Beau held him tighter. Sometimes Beau believed that if he just held onto Bobby tighter it would somehow lengthen the time between now and the day, that the universe would sense their closeness and not dare to sever it. All if Beau just held him closer, heartbeat to heartbeat. It was so dark in the room, the moonlight a thin sheet behind the curtains; just them and their bodies, their breaths. And he thinks he remembers Bobby smiling, that he felt it or even sensed it, the presence of something happy, something that, for a moment, let itself be hopeful. “Your heartbeat is so relaxing,” he said. “I love that you sleep like Dracula.”

#the way i literally tried to make this short. i kinda flopped #laughing so hard this is basically the same length as the other one but like bc my ass needed THAT excerpt at the end #camp nanowrimo #lover boy #me doing the exact wip intro style i said i didnt like for my camp nano post LOL! #i tried to parallel the vibes w the excerpts like #lure you in with the hopeless romantic quote and then OH! it's about seeing ur best friend slowly die

[autisticandroids]

"you couldve gotten him to sleep w you if you could convince it was his obligation as a man" ok this would not be hard to do AT ALL though is the thing. cas being visibly lonely and possibly weirdly horny and obviously into dean and then saying that if he was not around dean all the time, it'd be way easier to get laid would probably do it.

also stream the girlfriend experience by rageprufrock where cas complains about gettting boners like once and dean is like god ok i guess i'll teach you how to jerk off (fair warning sam characterisation in this sucks a little though)

re: this post.

i love the girlfriend experience! but no literally actually like the little posting spree i went on this morning about cas/lisa parallels was specifically inspired by a train of thought related to this. like. i was thinking about on labor by a_good_soldier + six hundred sundays by sobsicles (some specific relevant excerpts) + this vibe and i started thinking about like. okay a hypothetical post confession fic where cas is resurrected and jack returns him to dean and cas is like hm. well, fuck. now that dean knows about my feelings, there are two possible reactions he could have:

one: he could become angry with me for expecting something of him, even though i don't even though i don't expect anything from him, because wanting something from him and expecting something from him are the same in his mind.

two: he could try to fulfill my expectations without regard for his own desires, even though i don't even though i don't expect anything from him, because wanting something from him and expecting something from him are the same in his mind.

either of these would be bad. i should leave.

and so cas tries to leave and dean is like no. you cannot leave. why the fuck are you leaving me you bastard.

and cas is like "well, eventually, you are going to do one of these two things, because you have serious boundary issues." and dean, who was definitely at least considering doing thing number two, is like "obviously that's not what i was going to do, idiot."

and then i started sketching out more dialogue from this exchange and it came out like this:

cas: you don't want me

dean: you don't know me! i could be gay

cas: that is Not what i'm talking about

dean: ????then what are you talking about

cas: dean. did you love lisa braeden?

dean: but- i- wh- of course!!

cas: of course you played the role of being in love with her but, dean... did you want to be with her?

dean: ...

cas: you can't answer me because you don't know because it never occurred to you to ask the question

dean: but... but... you're not lisa.

cas: i'm someone who loves you and wants you to be my child's father. you and i already have a domestic life together but i have no idea where i stand with you. surely you can see the parallel.

anyway that's why i was thinking about that all morning. deancas deanlisa parallels are not just for "you did something terrible to my son" posting or guiltposting they're also for like. dean's-dysfunction-around-romance posting.

also, incidentally, i think on labor has one of the most interesting handlings of dean's sexuality crisis i've seen, which is: dean starts having sex with cas because he thinks he owes it to cas and then after the fact he's like wow! i liked that! i guess i'm into men. like he would have struggled and had a crisis except that he's too busy having other, even more insane problems. i'm actually going to pull out the paragraph that starts the sexuality crisis portion:

Pretty much the only thing about the whole Cas situation that doesn’t lead to a dumpster fire in Dean’s brain is the sex, which is the last thing Dean expected. Dean, it turns out, is bisexual. Which he probably shoulda figured out and gotten okay with before going and committing to fucking a man for the rest of his godforsaken life, but that woulda taken five billion years and he’s only got the next few decades with Cas, so. Time to speedrun it.

like i don't think this method would work for most fics but it's a really interesting direction to take it in.

i'm gonna end this post with a quote from a post about boundaries that i find applicable to the situation:

When you don’t feel like you fully own your own body, the world is a scary and unpleasant place. Every single desire expressed by another person is a demand on you. From there, you can screw up in two ways. There’s my failure mode, doing things I don’t enjoy and which my partner only enjoys because I’m lying to them. And there’s the failure mode where you go around invalidating desires when you can’t fulfill the implicit demands. Thus all the people who start arguing when they hear people say preferences are socially mediated. Thus all the people who insist that sad lonely people are in fact acting "entitled” when they talk about being sad and lonely.

When you believe that your body is yours, you can say “your need is valid and important and I’m not going to meet it because I don’t want to.”

When you believe that your body is common currency, the only 'no’ available to you is “your need is not valid and not important and I’m not going to meet it because you are not worth it.”

#spn #asks #anonymous