#carlward

…like that is not the cover story of every gay couple in the 1910s???

What?! There's a bonus chapter for Cast Aside? I never thought I'd write any more for this fic, but @edwardskhakipants inspired me with a request, so thank you to her!

Masterpost/prompts

Dec. 4 - Pick a Twilight couple (canon or AU) and tell us/draw their favorite way to snuggle.

Well, that intriguing parenthetical opened up a rat's nest of intertwining (and kinda nsfw? and also slashy--you've been warned) headcanons, here, so, sorry, please buckle up. I've been meaning to write about the role headcanons can play in fic writing for awhile, and at some point an even longer writing meta is due, but today I'll get straight to the point even though this will in no way be brief--I enjoy writing fic precisely because it lets me think about characterization in a deep and complicated way. I'm always writing fic to get at the characters first and the situation second. It's even embedded in the title of my tumblr.

When I write an AU, I don't consider myself to be writing a different version of the characters. I consider myself to be writing the same characters, with all the same personalities, motivations, concerns, and fatal flaws, just having gone through or going through different circumstances. Kairos Carlisle is "Sensitivity" Carlisle is Patroclus Carlisle is Ithaca Carlisle; same guy, different situations. It’s why all my AUs have a clear point at which they’ve diverged from canon—I’m experimenting with the character by changing their world and letting their world change them.

So the underlying headcanon. Carlisle is badly, badly touch-starved. His nurse cuddled him and snuggled him—and he was with her for a long time—but he eventually left nurse and went back to London and to his father, who was much more concerned that Carlisle be saved than that he feel loved. They had little to no physical contact. Just at the very moment when he might have married, become sexually active, and had children of his own to cuddle, he gets stripped of his human life and for his own safety, has to separate from humankind altogether for many years. Then, he finally finds friendship and companionship, but in a man whose touch violates every snippet of his privacy. And still he stays, far longer than he ought, before setting out again for another century and a half, until he brings home a seventeen-year-old boy and spends three entire days just holding him.

Carlisle craves physical contact with those he loves.

Edward does not care for this. He's turned at the very moment in his development in which he is perfectly primed to be absolutely mortified by parental physical contact (and there's no small amount of gay panic on both their parts about it anyway). So it's still mostly just the occasional shoulder pat; the joy and surprise when Edward hugs him on occasion.

It's not until Esme arrives, and after they navigate their collective fears and traumas, that he manages to actually be touched. To have someone who hugs him, and strokes his back, and runs her fingers through his hair, who kisses not just his lips but his head, his shoulders, his chest. Sexual intimacy is his first real physical intimacy of his very long life.

So. For this prompt, a canon snuggle, and an AU snuggle for this guy for whom touching those he loves is his source of highest joy:

So there are three that you are likely to find me just idly re-reading. Where I’m working on something and I’m just like, “Nope, need to revisit that one.” I’ll go on a bit about them since there are only a handful.  Bittersweet Hurt by Minerva One

This was my first go-round at CarlWard and I love it to pieces. Even though I tread some of the same water in Patroclus Rising, it’s never not fresh. What I love about this is that she starts from the question I always feel is central: why Edward? It’s a question I’m never not trying to answer in my own work. Sometimes I’m in Carlisle’s POV, sometimes in Edward’s, currently in Bella’s, but it’s always about that to me. The saga is about that to me.  The emotion in this one is just pitch-fucking-perfect. The build is slow and hot, the inevitability that the two are going to come together and that Carlisle’s going to be the reason everything goes to pieces--it’s just amazing. It gets at the ways in which Carlisle is utterly inadequate, completely not ready for what he started, and it just strips both of them bare, figuratively and delightfully literally. It also is tight. I think a lot of fanfic benefits from being novella-length--long enough to let the writer stretch out a bit, but short enough it doesn’t leave a novice writer scrambling trying to find the next plot point. This is beautifully plotted and leaves me a little breathless each time. I actually haven’t re-read it in awhile and need to.  Intervention by AllTheOtherNamesAreUsed

Let’s take a left turn. Okay, so now here’s where people are either going to have to come along with me or throw me out, ha ha ha. I er, happen to headcanon that Carlisle, being a kind of uptight, workaholic, who feels like he has to be in control of everything all the time--six vampire children, the process of hiding his family, the lives of his patients--would seek catharsis, somewhere. He needs some way of being safe, of allowing his mind to blank with those he loves. So the fact that this fic, written for a kinkfest meme, also happens to begin with my other favorite Carlisle sex headcanon, which is that he enjoys Esme putting him into subspace, is icing on a really nice CarlWard cake. The middle of the fic (spoiler all the Cullens are poly) I can kind of take or leave--it’s an enjoyable read but I don’t love it the way I love the first and last two chapters. The final two chapters of this kinkfic are romantic, feral Edward/Carlisle. One of the things I love most about it is that she doesn’t back away from the paternal stuff. This is post-BD, and they are carefully re-aligning what it means for Edward to still very much be Carlisle’s son and yet for them to evolve that relationship a bit. There’s a line in there about Carlisle’s love giving Edward roots and Bella’s giving him wings that is just so right. 

Trouble Follows by LyricalKris

I am too much of a lover of the vamp world to enjoy AH much. To me, Twilight is indeed as a semi-viral tumblr post put it, the story of a loving adorable couple and their chaos vampire children. I literally lose track of the characters in AH fic; it’s not enjoyable for me to read. I’ve been friends with Kris for--gosh I guess over  a decade now and I forget when she told me I needed to look at Trouble but I finally did and whipped through the 2.333 books in the series in a couple days. As I wrote above, I hc Carlisle as a sub, so I wasn’t sure I could handle an AH with him as a dom. But it works. I link the second one because while erotic scenes are always fun, I find a good plot and character conflict sexier than anything else you can put down on the page. The first book is mostly sexytimes with a little growth sprinkled in, but in this, the second installment, there’s just such a lovely build of conflict around the two and between the two, and she sold me on a perfectly in-canon, non-vampire Carlisle and that’s a tall fucking order. 

These are all mutli-chaps. Three shorts I revisit with some regularity are 

Everything in its Right Place by Avioleta. Again, this is a really nice one dealing with Carlisle wrestling with his feelings for both Edward and Esme; it has some deliciously angsty parts and is brilliantly researched. 

Red Geraniums by Pastiche Pen. Also one of the few AHs I re-read. It’s actually William I like in this story. In fact, I don’t know if she ever named Carlisle’s father in it. His name is William, fight me. :) The coupling in this one is great but like Trouble, it’s the plot here that gets me. A man coming to grips with his sexuality after he’s already done some things he regrets.