Summary: "Your Hands, Clasped" by Pearl_o.

[sprat.livejournal.com]

ekaterinn thought the blend of first and second person narrative worked very well in the first sections, where it brought "a certain wistfulness to Fraser wanting Ray." However, she thought the sex scene needed more intimacy than the style could support.

zebra363 thought that the style in which the story was written put her as a reader at "too great a distance from [the characters'] emotions" to allow her to fill in the blanks very successfully. She pointed out several places in which she found Ray's actions confusing, including the spot where Ray asks Fraser why he's telling the story about Steve. She said "If the story had been written in a way that permitted it, I'd've loved more detail about what was going on in both their minds."

She also felt the end of the story, though happy, did not seem to follow clearly from what had gone before.

pearl_o agreed that the ending could have been stronger and had a clearer journey to it. However, she said that she'd intended Ray's questioning Fraser's Steve story to be "less a rejection and more sincere". She felt that Ray knew Fraser usually had a reason for telling his stories, and he wanted to know what it was in this case.

china_shop liked the story's voice, saying she finds it "lyrical and poetic, particularly in the sense that you have to look beneath the surface to dig out the meanings of things."

She questioned Ray's overall crankiness in the story, saying that although the style of story didn't allow for glimpses of what was going on in his head, she felt there could have been some hints for the reader (even if they were misinterpreted by Fraser) that he was feeling some tenderness. She felt that the obliqueness of Ray's emotions here "also undermines Fraser’s essential character", because he and Ray generally communicate very well in canon, and because Fraser is "a student of human behaviour". She thought he would at least question Ray's actions here.

She liked Ray's asking Fraser why he was telling the Steve story, saying it was a "subtle and lovely" way for him to attempt to find out if Fraser was trying to declare himself.

She liked the fractured timeline as well, and the story's dreamlike feel. But she said that "overall, I’d like more hints about what’s going on beneath the surface. Or maybe there are lots of hints, and I'm simply refusing to accept them. Huh. Maybe I really just want what’s going on beneath the surface to be happier and more hopeful than it really is."