Pure Bodies and Clean Hearts by Speranza (Virgin Challenge)

[cesperanza.livejournal.com]

Title: Pure Bodies and Clean Hearts (26k)
Author: Speranza
Pairing: McShep
Summary: John gets a do-over.

Thanks to shalott, giddy, and res for beta beyond the call of duty.

Comments

[nestra.livejournal.com]

God, yes, the years had passed while Rodney had been working; the stream of time had dragged Rodney down and battered him against its own sort of rocks, and now it had brought him to John, gasping for breath and brand new.

*speechless with love*

[cesperanza.livejournal.com]

Thank you--(actually, and also thank resonant: she helped a ton with that whole scene! Betas rule!)

[fairestcat]

GUH.

God, only you could make them all virgins and yet make it strangely believable.

[cesperanza.livejournal.com]

Well, anything worth doing is worth doing well. *g* And I'm not one to skimp--hey, virginity for everybody, it's my party! So glad you liked.

[dogeared.livejournal.com]

Oh oh oh, I love John's fierce and overwhelming joy, and the stream of time had dragged Rodney down and battered him against its own sort of rocks, and now it had brought him to John, gasping for breath and brand new is just so lovely.

[cesperanza.livejournal.com]

Thank you!--and thank resonant, too: she helped a lot with that particular scene. Betas are wonderful things.

[mamadeb.livejournal.com]

and God, Rodney loved him, Rodney would have sex with him and still give a damn about him tomorrow--and that thought drove him to lift his mouth off Rodney's and fumble blindly for his wrists.

It's as if he had a second moment of rebirth right then.

Yes.

[cesperanza.livejournal.com]

Yep; John's having a first time of a different sort. Go John! (& thank you!)

[wickedwords.livejournal.com]

The ending was absolutely adorable.

[cesperanza.livejournal.com]

Thank you! It's very appreciated!

[ladycat777.livejournal.com]

I love the thought of all of them being virgins -- and John's giddy happiness as he's made new again.

And, of course, sex that leaves me breathless. Thank you!

[cesperanza.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I figured--why skimp. *g* And actually, they were all plausible virgins to me, John excepted, so I took care of that with Speranza's Patented Re-virginizing Treatment!

[cathexys.livejournal.com]

omg...leave it to you to take a difficult concept (how to get folks in their thirties to still be virgins) and turn it on its head. i loved the making him a virgin again moment only to sdquee in delight about all the others not *needing* it!!!

and the john/rodney scene was marvelous, the best i love you i think i've ever read, hostile, annoyed, both in giving and receiving...

i loved the style you chose here, all lush and beautiful and your language is like the currents that are dragging john along...

thank you!!!

[cesperanza.livejournal.com]

Heey--yeah, why go halfway on something like this? *g* In a way, it's not difficult at all; I thought they could all quite plausibly be interpreted as canonically virgin except for John, so I took care of that. And I'm glad the "I love you" came off; it's a tricky thing, as you know. The lushness--actually, I overdid the lushness in the first draft, and resonant helped me cut it down; lushness not being my usual style, I needed some help with it! There are still a couple of wonky things in it that I'd probably work out if I felt like reopening it, but I don't. *g* That's the beauty of flashfic, really--it forces you to confront these interesting ideas (virgins! drugs! apocalypse!) and make SOMETHING of them in a limited time frame, trying to figure out what the specific instance of the general theme looks like--virginity in DS would be a very different thing, I think.

Anyway, thanks!--so glad you liked!

[amalthia]

I really liked this. :)

[cesperanza.livejournal.com]

I'm very very glad. Thank you!

[farwing.livejournal.com]

This is extremely awesome and interesting and hot.

[cesperanza.livejournal.com]

Thank you! I don't know which adjective there I like best! (though oddly, I'm leaning toward interesting; god knows, it's hard some days to be interesting in a first time slash story!)

Mispronunciation Award

[wordwitch.livejournal.com]

And the first thing I thought on seeing your title was Ces is writing The Professionals fic now???

OH well!

Re: Mispronunciation Award

[wordwitch.livejournal.com]

And, read, it matches up with my usual motto: read anything by Speranza, it's all good.

*loves*

There's a definition of virginity that is silent on sex and instead looks at to whom you belong. By this definition, no mothers and few fathers are virgin: they belong to their children. Most lovers are not virgin, but nearly all one-night-stand people are.

It's a very useful definition of virginity for those of us who lacked control over our first sexual experiences.

[kimberlite.livejournal.com]

He was careening through the water at top speeds, and he tried to be really alive to it, because this might be his last wild ride, and there were worse ways to die. He'd always wanted to go out flying--doing barrel rolls at enough Gs that he'd black out before he crashed-- but this was pretty damn close.

Wow -- that was quite a ride. Loved how John thought about vertical bearings and other pilot stuff. Very cool how alive he felt in the water and then how new and sensitized afterward. Poor Rodney, attracting the wrong type of attention, but yay for happy (and hot and funny) endings. :)

[cesperanza.livejournal.com]

Loved how John thought about vertical bearings and other pilot stuff.--ooh, thank you for catching that. It makes me really happy: I wondered if anyone would! And you know, even surging to certain death, John Sheppard is a guy who could enjoy the speed of a good ride. *G*

Rodney--yeah, it occurred to me that Rodney probably would have a zillion pederast science profs wanting to touch his brilliant little body, and would have to stave them off somehow. I could see him becoming deliberately offputting, deliberately defensive to protect himself--and then looking up later and realizing that he'd missed certain other kinds of chances. It can happen really, really easily, I think.

[rae-fa.livejournal.com]

Oh that was really good! From John drowning/being born again, to not being able stay a virgin for very long...to the sex (which was very hot!)

Fantastic!

[cesperanza.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I realized afterwards that John really did have that virginity burning a hole in his pocket. *g* Ten hours!

[panisdead.livejournal.com]

Awwww. I was almost sorry to see the Virgin Warrior Guild despoiled; that would have made great comic book. Teyla and Ronon will have to recruit. :)

[cesperanza.livejournal.com]

Yeah; it is sort of a shame. John Sheppard really is a terrible virgin, though--ten hours! *g* Clearly, not a man destined for long-term virginity. *G*

[kylielee1000.livejournal.com]

I think this is the summary, really: God, yes, the years had passed while Rodney had been working; the stream of time had dragged Rodney down and battered him against its own sort of rocks, and now it had brought him to John, gasping for breath and brand new.

This bit ties in the water and the renewal, which are great themes here. I liked that the renewal was hard, because it should be.

[cesperanza.livejournal.com]

Yes, totally, though the problem with summaries--and ratings and warnings and pairings and disclaimers, oh, how I hate them all!--is that it gives too much away; I mean, you want to read the line in context, I think, and not give your hand away before the story starts about who's a virgin and where and why (in fact, in that way, John's almost a red herring; midway through the story, you think, oh, he's the virgin, and I hope there was some readerly surprise when it was revealed that, no, the others all are too.

And yeah, totally, renewal should be hard! These villagers know how to throw a ritual cleansing, by God! *G*

[sp23.livejournal.com]

"Meanwhile, you were a virgin for, like, three hours," Rodney said.

Hee! Yeah, that virginity thing just couldn't stick on John. *g* Really enjoyed this.

[cesperanza.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it just totally burned a hole in his pocket, didn't it? *g* He's so not cut out for chastity!

[adafrog.livejournal.com]

Great story. I was also skeptical about their process, but you did a very believable job at painting John's transformation. Love John and Rodney at the end.

Curious

[cesperanza.livejournal.com]

I was also skeptical about their process--whose, the villagers? or the characters? Do you mean that the ritual--as John said--sounded like total bullshit, but was persuasively transformative?

[corinna-5.livejournal.com]

I love the fact that you made Rodney a believeably non-pathetic virgin, and I loved John's rebirth completely.

[cesperanza.livejournal.com]

It's funny, because I don't really get the pathetic virgin thing--I mean, there are people who have beliefs, and there are people who haven't had opportunities, and there are people who just haven't liked the available sexual options, and, like, I just don't get where any of these things are pathetic: it's just meanness, really, that makes people think or say so. I was a virgin myself once, and a very sexy and chic and non-pathetic virgin I was! And Rodney--well, not just Rodney, actually: I could totally believe that all Rodney and Ronon and Teyla were all canoncally (non-pathetic) virgins: I mean, Ronon actually tells us that he stopped for a meal for ONE NIGHT and the Wraith destroyed the entire village. Teyla is an adult woman who, in her position of leadership, arguably couldn't risk pregnancy, and so like many women leaders historically, celibacy seems like a really sound and strong option (I mean, Teyla's kind of like Saint Joan D'arc in all sorts of ways.) Rodney--it seemed really plausible to me that if Rodney went to university early, he'd be in a hell of a sexual bind--too young for the normally aged college kids (who are certainly not going to be having sex with a high-school-aged kid) and possibly the victim of sexual predators on the faculty. So, if I were Rodney, I would keep my head down and develop a noli me tangere kind of a personality for good, solid defensive reasons--and that by time he looked up, maybe sometime in graduate school, or even in a post-doc--he would have found it difficult to reach out and make sexual connections. And then, you know, what do you do?

Er, obviously I've thought a lot about this. Sorry to dump it all out on you! *g*

[mutecornett.livejournal.com]

Years of memories seemed to be slipping away--some vague flash of losing his virginity on a basement sofa, fading snapshots of three-day-pass love affairs, the back seats of cars, grimy men's room doors. Now, there was only the cramped, dark tent, Rodney's hands tenderly sliding over his bruised and scraped skin, Rodney's mouth, wet and soft against his.

I really, really love that part, and I love *how* you made John a virgin again, not by physically erasing his virginity but *emotionally*, by making him so aware of life for the sheer pleasure of it through his nearly dying, like a teenager, and by having this new love thing with Rodney sort of blot out the past. I'm not making any sense, but I just really, really liked that.

[cesperanza.livejournal.com]

I'm not even sure I know what it would mean to physically erase someone's virginity--the emotional way is the way that matters, and really, any sexual matters aside, John's the most jaded of the four, I think, and in that way was the guy ripe for a dunking and a new appreciation of the miracle that is his life. I mean, God knows he might never have stopped to take account of the fact that he--loner extraordinare--was now in another galaxy with a huge position of respect and responsibility, enmeshed in a family and really free of any regulations he might have spent his life butting against. And so, you know, John really needs to kick back and look at the stars a little. He's freer than he thinks; in a lot of ways, he's got it all--and by the end, he's got love, too. *G*

[trinityofone.livejournal.com]

This was wonderful, wonderful, and absolutely the perfect thing to read tonight (and pretty perfect in general). I so want John to have that second chance, and be able to connect with people, really--and not just with Rodney (though there was some glorious connecting with Rodney in this story), but with the whole team, which you show here, beautifully.

[cesperanza.livejournal.com]

Thank you so much; you know, just offhand, I've been meaning to write to you because I've been slowly working my way through your back-catalogue and your writing is really rocking my world; you're just wildly inventive in an unsettling way that I envy and enjoy but can't manage myself (can't resist the punchline, which has it's place but is a fatal flaw for a certain kind of horror/moral ambiguity. *g* I think, too, I'm often drawn to writers who are very stylistically different from me; I want to read what I can't write, otherwise I'd bloody well write it myself!) And your stuff is just really amazing--really, not just inventive, but with knife-clean execution. I'm just really loving it.

[porntestpilot.livejournal.com]

Wait, are they going to get kicked out of the sacred forest now?

Oh man, Rodney, yeah, I didn't even think about that second thing, but eww. Damn. This was amazing per usual. Nifty idea too.

[cesperanza.livejournal.com]

Wait, are they going to get kicked out of the sacred forest now?

YES. God, I did think about that!--I mean, I think they're gonna try to bluff it out, but I think it's very possible that this story has a terrible ending where John ends up pulling his P-90 and backing slowly to the jumper with Rodney behind him, because Rodney is SO not a strong swimmer! And Rodney would be kind of whimpering, "I was a virgin for 38 years, I'm not ready to go back!" and it would all get ugly. *g*

And yeah; I think that Rodney would be in a terrible sexual bind--too young for and rejected by college students, who are not going to have sex with someone of high-school age, and totally vulnerable to perverse faculty and older students. If I were Rodney, I'd develop a standoffish personality just to protect myself from pederasts!

[isiscolo.livejournal.com]

Adorable! And I love the metaphor.

[cesperanza.livejournal.com]

Thank you so much!

[wildmachinery.livejournal.com]

and God, Rodney loved him, Rodney would have sex with him and still give a damn about him tomorrow

omg so much love.

[cesperanza.livejournal.com]

Hee--thank you! (Really, with the first taste of love up there, John's lost a realer virginity than Rodney has.)

[sffan.livejournal.com]

Awesome story. The sex scene was lovely and warm.

[cesperanza.livejournal.com]

Thank you so much; I try to be about the lovely and warm whenever I can! *g*

[oxoniensis.livejournal.com]

A baptism into virginity - you made it work so very well!

[cesperanza.livejournal.com]

Thank you!--I figured John was about due for a ritual cleansing. *g*

[lillian78.livejournal.com]

I was hesitant to put anything else in this category before but I will now..your fics are officially better than chocolate

[cesperanza.livejournal.com]

Wow. Thank you. I will try to live up to that! (gulp--no pressure or anything!)