like a fever that just won't break.

1. On a Steel Horse
Author: glorious_spoon

Genre: gen, post-canon (S9)
Characters: Dean, the Impala
Tags: death (temporary), demon!Dean
Rating: PG
Word Count: ~1600
Summary: It’s already too late by the time I rise up through the layers of twilight to the crossroads that called me. The big car is little more than a twisted heap of scrap metal, the smell of burning antifreeze overpowering the fading scent of lilies on the evening breeze.
Reccer's Notes: This is the perfect ghost story. This is a perfect story. And you have to read this. For more detailed, but slightly spoilery, praise of this fic, here's the comment I wrote in response to it.

2. Fight Club
Author: beesandbrews

Genre: gen, pre-series, character study, hurt/comfort
Characters: Dean, Sam
Tags: bruising/internal damage, injuries (misc.), pain, caretaker!Dean, wound tending
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: ~2800
Summary: The brothers are left to their own devices while John is working a job in a neighboring town. They're short on cash and Sam is a growing boy with a hollow leg. Dean remembers what's that's like, so when he finds a way to pad his wallet that doesn't involve fifteen minutes in a back alley with a stranger, he goes for it.
Reccer's Notes: There's this hard-hitting, glorious, masculine sensation to this. The piece (and its subject) are wild, but practiced, and mediated by a certain sort of care that I find very distinctive of the piece, relative to others with a similar subject matter, and to Dean as a character. This is one of those fics that takes a mere 3k and nails something vital yet underexplored about Dean--past and present--and doesn't flinch.

3. Kin & Keeper
Author: steeplechasers

Genre: slash, memory play; romance; hurt/comfort; canon AU (post-s5—Sam is not raised from Hell)
Characters: Dean, Lisa, Ben, Castiel, Sam
Pairings: Sam/Dean; Dean/Lisa
Tags: grief, alcoholism, depression, post-traumatic stress, hallucinations, abandonment issues, dissociation, whatever the opposite of repressed memories is
Rating: R
Word Count: ~107k
Warnings: discussion of canon character death; child abuse and neglect; sexual content
Summary: On May 5th, 1983, an infant boy is carried for the first time through the doorway of a house in Lawrence, Kansas.

This is Dean’s first memory of his brother. There are others. They are vivid, angry, and relentless—and now, six months after Sam’s leap into Hell, they are coming to him with alarming frequency. He’s trying his best to live the easy apple-pie life he swore himself to, but the more he remembers, the harder it gets to ignore Sam’s shadow filling up the corners of Lisa Braeden’s house. What’s worse, he has no idea what the onslaught of these memories portend—or in what ways they will change him.

Reccer's Notes: This is the first fic I've read that was over 60k or so--I tend not to read fic I can't finish in a single sitting--but if you're like me, and hesitant about the long stuff, you should read this one anyway. It's brilliantly moody and atmospheric, but never in ways that detach the reader from the characters and situations at hand. It's a picture of mourning in adulthood as much as it is one of living in childhood, and both present (that is, post-S5) and pre-series storylines wend together toward a climax that's really just masterful. I didn't want it to ever end, and I'd definitely read it again. For more detailed, but slightly spoilery, praise of this fic, here's the comment I wrote in response to it.

Hey everyone! I just wanted to drop a few recs here--all three of these are pretty disparate from one another, united only by their excellence. From torturously angsty to wonderfully healing, to me this is a trifecta of "yup, and this is why we H/C, world." All of them were written for hoodie_time's most recent comment meme. The meme is closed to new prompts now, but fills are welcome and highly encouraged indefinitely! :)

Title: 'O Brother, Where Art Thou?'
Author: quickreaver
Characters: Benny, Dean, Sam
Genre/pairing: gen
Rating: PG-13
Word-count: 2707
Spoilers: Takes place between 8x14 and 8x18.
Warnings: N/A
Summary: Based on the prompt, "Benny helps Dean through his involuntary detox in Purgatory. But he starts drinking again once he's topside, and Benny finds out and sneaks past Sam to talk to him and is really sympathetic and all like, brother, I have a (blood) drinking problem too, so I understand, let's help each other out, and Sam realizes that Benny is actually a pretty good friend after all."
Reccer's Notes: I should just invest in one of those customized rubber stamps for my comments re: the beauty of H/C, irrespective of anything else, because <33333. Dean/alcohol is my sadTP, and I love the way it's thrown into the mix amidst Sam, Dean, and Benny here. I love Benny's, hmmm, sort of reticent yet compassionate-all-the-same narrative here. And Sam's first line is just sublime; his entire entrance, really. I love how palpably his presence shifts the dynamic of the fic--and how that dynamic demonstrates considerable fluctuation thereafter, right up until the end.

Title: Untitled
Author: ang_the_adverse
Characters: Dean, Lisa
Genre/pairing: het
Rating: PG-13 (sex)
Word-count: ~1000
Spoilers: N/A
Warnings: N/A
Summary: Based on the prompt, "Past s5, Dean lives with Lisa and Ben, and suffers all teh issues and PTSD after the clusterfuck that has been his life. One of the reactions his body has to that (it can have other things, too - let your imagination run wild) is erectile dysfunction. Dean just can't get it up. It's got nothing to do with Lisa - in fact, it would be super sweet if they still have sex (of sorts) and Dean makes sure Lisa gets off and is happy. He just doesn't get off himself anymore."
Reccer's Notes: There's a bedroomy, but down-to-earth feel to this whole fic that just screams Lisa to me. Separate from a lot of fics that include Lisa, I mean; I think it might have something to do with, hmmm. The sense of owned experience, maybe. To me, it felt very much like, "This is our life. And we're gonna rock that in a way that only we can."

Title: Won't Cry Wolf
Author: geckoholic
Characters: Dean, OMC, John, Sam
Genre/pairing: Dean/OMC
Rating: R
Word-count: ~3000
Spoilers: N/A
Warnings: prostitution of a minor, dubious consent, rape
Summary: The first time it happens, he's thirteen. Winter in Colorado, rundown apartment complex, and Sammy broke a vase in the hallway. It was an accident, he was running around, playing, and he tripped. Their landlord said the fucking vase was expensive, and money's tight as it is.

What the hell else was he supposed to do?

Reccer's Comments: This fic is everything that I find appealing about hooker!fic--that sort of consensual push and pull, that aspect of the clandestine, and we all know how well the Winchesters deal with the clandestine--taken to the next extreme. The sensitivity with which you are able to approach the subject here, without pandering to established notions of political correctness, or otherwise trite representations, is criminal. It is so, so good. And the way Dean is written here is so very true to his character, in a way that I don't even think I can describe.

You know those people who can match specific wines to best complement certain meals? There definitely needs to be a contingent of fandom that pairs Supernatural episodes together for best effect. Or fic together for best effect! For those of you with discerning Dean H/C palettes (all of you!), I'd like to offer up a feast of my recent favorites. I suppose if there's a strict theme it's "Dean and major depression"--and while I absolutely adore each fic individually, I'm reccing them together, and in the following order, because I think their interaction with each other adds a new exquisite flavor to the mix. There's something very special about a body of fandom that can continue a story together, however unintentionally, while keeping to styles and voices and interpretations that are also so vibrantly distinguishable from one another:

1. Prairie Wind (the On The Day It Rained Forever remix) by geckoholic
Characters: Dean, Sam
Genre: hurt/comfort, angst, curtain!fic (a bit)
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: self-harm
Summary: Out here, nothing to do, Dean's not getting better. - A while after Dean's back from hell, Sam decides what his brother needs is a little downtime. It doesn't work out as planned.

Reccer’s comments: This is tragic and gorgeous and phenomenally sad. I love the understatement of it, the attention to all the sad little things. And just--the idea that there's a good chance they've hit a point from which there just isn't any coming back. Not really.

[The original is also great and can be found here!: Prairie Wind by honeylocusttree]

2. In the Light by fannishliss
Characters: Dean, Lisa
Genre: hurt/comfort, angst
Rating: PG
Warnings: none
Summary: Back in the day, Zeppelin had made Dean feel fiery and alive and brimming with confidence. Dean remembered that feeling. 5x22

Reccer's Comments: This brings back everything I felt about 5x22/its afterward and then some. It lives and breathes its own music, as well as its nods to the music that has played such an important role for Supernatural and the Winchesters, with equal facility and grace. Just gorgeous.

3. it would be this by amonitrate
Characters: Dean, Lisa, Soulless!Sam
Genre: hurt/comfort, angst/drama
Rating: R
Warnings: soulless care-taking
Summary: "I'm not trying to mess with you, Dean. It's what you said. Leverage. The vamps can use Lisa and Ben against you."

Reccer's Comments: H/C is a great genre. NOT THAT I'M BIASED OR ANYTHING. (And you all assuredly approach the debate with equal impartiality. ;)) But I digress! There's a lot of reasons this fic is excellent--the attention to detail, its finest nuances, the depth and scope of its characterizations, its pacing, the fact that it is damn good writing on any day, in any genre--but I think the one enticement I can offer that is unique to this fic and this fic only is how perfectly it defines what hurt/comfort is all about. I don't want to give anything away, but what's at work in this fic is the reason hurt/comfort is a genre at all; and I don't think that we, as a corner of fandom, have that many opportunities to be able to point to something and say: That right there? is why I read fan fiction.

4. Morning Shift by downjune
Characters: Dean, Sam
Genre: hurt/comfort, curtain!fic (ish)
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: none
Summary: He awoke each morning with the desire to do right, to be a good and meaningful person, to be, as simple as it sounded and as impossible as it actually was, happy. And during the course of each day his heart would descend from his chest into his stomach. - Jonathan Safran Foer

Reccer's Comments: I'm not sure what I can say about this fic that isn't better said simply by experiencing the writing itself, but to me it feels like an ending without an ending. It's a sad thing, and also a happy thing, and it intermixes the two poles in ways that seem like such an event cannot possibly exist. But it does, and that is wondrous. This fic offers a breath and a reprieve from everything that's come before (both in canon and in the fics listed above) without ever erasing or undermining or hand-waving what has come before.