fic meme answers: Heat Wave

gracerene asked question #10 about Heat Wave, a Sirius/James fic from 2005. (And yes, actually remembering the writing process might be tough on some of these, but I'll try!)

10: Why did you choose this pairing for this particular story?

It was for a fest and the pairing was specified in the prompt ("Sirius/James, Dom!Sirius, bondage, drawnout pleasure until James can't take it anymore. Playful, cocky, smirking Sirius"), so why did I choose this prompt?

I got interested in James/Sirius after OotP, which really shifted my mental image of the Maurauders. Since PoA there had been a fannish assumption, which I shared, that Sirius and Remus were the closest friends (possibly already in a relationship), and James was the leader. To me, OotP changed all that. It seemed clear to me that Sirius and James were the ones who were close, both from the way they interacted in the flashback and the fact that Sirius went to live with the Potters; his living with Remus or Peter was apparently never even considered. I also realized that Sirius was more of a leader type than I'd thought, and that to some extent James was taking cues from him, which makes the way the Prank played out make a lot of sense.

In light of all this, pairing them up began to seem a lot more interesting. I know I'd already started to write some J/S fic but hadn't gotten very far, and seeing this prompt was serendipitous since it gave some specific direction to stuff that was on my mind but still kind of nebulous. If the prompt had been Dom!James I doubt I would have taken it, because what I wanted to write about had to do with Sirius having the dominant role in their friendship and that dynamic progressing into a sexual relationship. Sirius feels like James will follow him anywhere and keeps pushing it further, and this prompt fit that concept perfectly.

And I mean, yes, I know it's a PWP and maybe I wasn't completely successful in getting all this background out onto the page. But it's what I had in mind when writing. There's still a small part of me that thinks I'm going to finish the other fic in this universe that I started on, because there's more I wanted to say about this pairing and what I thought would happen as they got older and realized there might be places they weren't comfortable going with it, not sexually but emotionally. (I remember an astute reader commenting with distress that they never kiss... There's a reason I wrote it that way.)

Anyway, that's one down. I'll have to get to the rest of these another day! And if you want to check out the rest of the questions or pose one of your own, the original meme post is here.

Crossposted from Dreamwidth. Feel free to comment wherever you're comfortable.