REC: His Look by house-afire (Our Flag Means Death, Wee John Feeney & Izzy Hands)

[delphi]

Fandom 50 #11

His Look by house-afire
Fandom: Our Flag Means Death
Relationship: Wee John Feeney & Izzy Hands
Medium: Fic
Length: ~1100 words
Rating: Teen
My Bookmark Tags: character study, happy ending, missing scene, identity, gender, starting over, friendship, bathing/grooming, queer community, theatre
Author's Summary: Prompt: 100 words of trying it again


Excerpt:

It's hardly his first Calypso party. Not even the first one with all the foofaraw; even harder-edged crews like a good masquerade every now and then. But he’s never been one of the gilded boys, light dancing off his spangles. He used to just drink and watch them, something in his chest yawing about at the sight. They were just pretty pieces of paper tossed about in the wind, he told himself back then: flashy but with no weight to them. You couldn’t rely on lovely things.

This is a gorgeous missing scene from Calypso's Birthday, where Izzy and Wee John are getting into drag for the party and talking about performance, being seen, and just being. The author has an incredibly deft hand with metaphor, working with a set of imagery that lands in the perfect place for Izzy's self-awareness—one concerned with the practicalities of sailing and survival, of the essential material of things, of the simple existential experience of weight—and they bring just as much depth of characterization to Wee John in his pragmatic responses to Izzy's inner turmoil. I love everything about this.

Comments

[muscle_wizard]

Everything about this is oh so lovely... I melted at this especially:


But he remembers, distantly, how it felt to do it because he liked it. How it felt to use other men’s music, other men’s tender words, as a crutch and not have to feel weak for it, because that was just what fucking singing was. To get swept up in a tide but not drown in it. He could use that.

I really love the queerness you rec, it feels like home to me.

[delphi]

I'm so glad you enjoyed it! That part really got me too. "identity" is one of my most-used bookmarking tags, and it's pretty much entirely because of the weakness I have for this kind of story. Anything that spends time with the relationship between a character's awareness of themselves and their awareness of how they are/would be perceived by the world.

[lokifan]

Gorgeous, thanks for the rec!

[delphi]

Very happy to share!