So I was driving through the lovely luminous evening, doing errands, zooming down the highway and punching through radio stations, and then I hit one that was playing "All for You," a song that always makes me totally happy because it's inextricably associated in my head with Hth's Ray/Ray "What It Is I See in You" series of stories.

(Parenthetically, one of the joys of fandom is the way that it turns certain songs into happiness-triggers, usually because they're linked in my mind to vids I love. I had a hard time once explaining to P. why I was grinning and bopping along to Billy Joel's "Only the Good Die Young," because I couldn't say "It's Sonny! and Vinnie! and their love is so sweet and violent and fucked-up!")

Anyway -- so I was zooming along, full of joy and bouncing in my seat, when it struck me that my delight was only partly because of how very, very much I love those stories of Hth's, and how well that song fits those stories, with all its snarky rueful heartfelt rough-tenderness; it was even more because Ray/Ray, as a -- what would you call it, subset? genre? of dS fanfiction represents to me a kind of apotheosis of what fanfiction *can* do, a transcendence of what we're given in canon.

Because, really, canonically, Ray/Ray? As thermidor says in her ship_manifesto entry:

Now that we’ve met the guys, let’s discuss the mountain of evidence in canon for this pairing.

::sound of crickets chirping::

And, yeah, but the deal is -- it's one thing to write great slash for, oh, let's say Blair and Jim, who it is blindingly obvious are not only *so doing it* but also *so married* into the bargain. I mean, great fun, but it's kind of like being the first person in the Alaska gold fields, where the nuggets are just lying there on the ground waiting to be picked up. Whereas something like Ray/Ray--you gotta *dig*.

And what the Ray/Ray slashers are digging for isn't those little specks of canonical subtext--it's the core elements of who *this* guy is and who *that* guy is, and then seeing the ways that the cores of those two guys implausibly, uncanonically, illogically ... *fit*. Ray/Ray is a testament to the ability of slashers to create complicated, nuanced, gritty and convincing relationships by seeing down to the guts of characters, and building up from there with their imagination and their intuition for what makes *these two* work together. People sometimes diss fanfiction for not being "art" because it's "not original," but by that standard, Ray/Ray? Is art.

(And I say this as someone who's a really hard sell for Vecchio in any kind of a same-sex relationship -- which is not because I don't like Vecchio [I *so dig* the guy], or because [as some people say] I don't want to imagine Vecchio having sex or think he's unsexy, but rather because if there's any single character anywhere in media fandom who pings me as totally 100% unswervingly heterosexual, it's Ray Vecchio.)

(And you know, I *totally* buy that Vecchio loves Fraser, and I'd go further and say he's in love with Fraser, and yet the fact that I do not see this love as ever heading anywhere between the percales doesn't dim it an iota; rather, it lends a certain sorrowing thwarted rueful lustre that you just don't get in your conventional happily-ever-after story.)

(Which tempts me to swerve off still further into my long-procrastinated essay on how *stupid* it is for people to rant, as they sometimes do, about "These darn slashers! They insist on seeing sex everywhere! And it completely wrecks the glorious innocent purity of pure untainted *male friendship*!" because, dude, au contraire, it makes that pure male friendship all the more glorious for its *rarity.* Heh. But I digress.)

Anyway, where the hell was I? So I have all due respect for "original" fiction writers, the ones who create their own characters and tell their stories. But I also have all the respect in the world for all of us here in fandom, the alchemists of popular culture, who take straw and lead and air and, sometimes, turn it into gold. The kind you've got to dig for, but damn, it shines beautifully.