Somewhere between 10 and 20 subspace/headspace recs (Inception, SGA)

[bironic]

Square 1: Ageplay Recs
Square 2: Food Recs
Square 3: Vehicular Recs
Square 4: Subspace/Headspace Recs
Square 5: Verbal Humiliation Recs


I'm going with a straightforward interpretation on this one: Stories that do well at depicting characters sliding into a place in their heads where they can just be during sex, where it is about flow and not about thought, where they exist to please their dominant partners or simply float in pleasure and contentment. Subspace, if the term doesn't make you laugh because you think of the Star Trek word for faster-than-light communication first. Or stories that depict the difficulty of falling into subspace, or discuss subspace directly. Or stories where a character has slipped into a different headspace than their own natural one during a sexual situation. And by "a character" mostly I mean Eames, who can forge himself into different bodies—which often gets extrapolated in fic to include different minds—in dreams. But I also mean roleplay.




I have to start with skellerbvvt's Rule Ten. This is a long story that was written "live" in installments of a few comment!fills per night for many weeks, and it won't read as well all at once as it did then, since the uneven pacing and tense changes and typos and threads that get picked up and dropped etc. will be more noticeable. However. It is an amazing journey. Among the many reasons to give this a try in light of today's theme is its depiction of Eames, 17ish, exploring his sexual identity (submissive, rule-loving, gay) through his relationship with Arthur (mid-20s, dominant, reluctant to even discuss power dynamics with a minor no matter how attracted they are to each other). The tension is gorgeous, and the little breaks and lapses and dreams and fantasies along the way are accordingly satisfying.

Part of the journey is Eames learning what "subspace" is. He fits so perfectly with Arthur that one afternoon he slips away into his head, dreamy and content, just because Arthur gives him a command and touches him with authority. They're both surprised by it later; Eames because he doesn't know what it is or that it happened, and Arthur because he's only really ever heard about it.

"Eames, what are you on?" Arthur asks, because it could be pills, he supposes. Eames will probably tell him, if he asks. He's never really been shy about it before, for a bit he'd tried to push Arthur into reacting, somehow, and Arthur hadn't. Just made Eames shovel the driveway and the sidewalk a block in either direction the next morning.

Eames blinks up at him. "Didn't take anything." His arms go limp and he rests his head into Arthur's leg and sighs, blinking lazily. "Just feel good, I guess."

Arthur puts a hand on the back of Eames neck and Eames sighs with such a sense of peace and acceptance, that the suspicions creeping up along Arthur's spinal column sinks down deep into his brain.

"Eames, look at me." He says and Eames does, rolling over into an awkward curl and stares up at him, eyes blows and still smiling and Arthur still thinks it's probably drugs, because what he suspects it is just doesn't make any kind of sense.

"What are you thinking about?" Arthur asks and Eames is still staring at him, but not really seeing, and Eames is reaching up with his hand, so Arthur grabs it and holds on, which seems to please Eames in some fundamental way and he relaxes just that extra little bit until he might as well be liquid.

"Boots." Eames says. "Thinking about your boots. By the door. They're just. Clean. And you put them there. And you put me here." Eames gestures sort of grandly around and smiles to himself, practically nuzzling into Arthur's thigh. "And then I just sort of stopped thinking."

Not that any progress in this story is so simple. When they (spoiler?) finally get together, Eames is so nervous after all the buildup that he can't find the same headspace with anything approaching the ease of that first time. It's fascinating to watch Arthur try to get him back there.

"If you don't like this," Arthur says, pulling away, pressing his cheek to Eames, "If you hate this, then we'll figure something out. Do you understand that?"

"I won't hate it." Eames maintained, because he had to. Arthur didn't have sex without sceneing, he'd said as much, and fucked if Eames wanted to change Arthur. He didn't. He wanted Arthur exactly as he was, and he didn't want to figure anything out, he wanted this. He just wasn't sure how to deal with it yet.

"Then why are you so tense?" Arthur asked, hand splayed over Eames stomach and Eames began chewing his thumbnail because talking on the couch was one thing, but now they were here, and this needed to work. It had to work. If it didn't work than everything would fall apart and he couldn't let that happen. It had to be perfect.

"And normally all it takes is my hand around your wrist to get you shifting in your seat." Arthur said […]

There's laughter later. It's beautiful. And finally, Eames gets there again.

Arthur kisses him when Eames hits his feet to the bed and pushes up. Eames doesn't know. Doesn't. He. Arthur. He has Arthur. Arthur will take care of everything.

It's a unique portrayal of the inside of the character's head who's floating off like that. skeller's writing voice is really interesting like that throughout the whole piece.




The Understood Boundaries of Self by strzyga is about Eames learning what it's like to submit as he prepares to do a job with Arthur, who is a dom and will be playing his master in a dream. Eames' journey from discomfort—

He feels ridiculous.

The linoleum is hard beneath his knees, and he's not wearing any of the gear, not yet, but he is terribly uncomfortable. He shifts his weight, staring sullenly at the floor, and tightens his fists where they rest on his thighs.

—to full, trusting submission—

Eames drops without prompting to his knees, settles between Arthur's spread thighs. […] Eames' world shrinks to the small space that encompasses them, to the fingers that coil skeins of his hair between them, the warm affectionate press of Arthur's knee to his shoulder. The pain in his own knees is phantom.

He doesn't even notice their mark has arrived until Arthur tugs lightly at his hair.

—is very well depicted, I thought. It's one of those lovely stories where a convenient plot device teases out a kink a character never knew they had.




pay-off by solvent_90 is another character-discovers-his/her-propensity-for-submitting story, this time Arthur after he agrees to pretend to be Eames' sub in front of a business associate for one night for a cut of a $2 million job. Things get more intense than he expects.

He had agreed to this, had drawn the line at public fucking but had thought that Eames feeling him up a little would be no big deal and would add verisimilitude. But now he couldn't think past this stupid fantasy of begging Eames's permission to get off later, after the job, before he fucking killed Eames. He couldn't breathe. Eames kept petting him, lightly at first and then he was tugging, increasingly painful, and oh please please please –

Be sure to scroll down; the fic goes to part 10, and crap, it's not finished yet, but at least it doesn't stop on a cliffhanger? Here is another teaser:

And then he looked at Eames's boots again and it was like something shattering, a shocking release of a feeling he hadn't even known he was keeping bottled up.

"I want it," he choked out. "Please. Sir."

"Oh," Eames said softly, surprised. "Oh sweetheart."

Flip the scenario around. Helenish wrote Untitled, wherein Eames has to pretend on the spur of the moment to be Arthur's boy toy for an hour when a business associate comes by, and then has to reprise the role when the associate invites them both to his club one night. I like this one because Eames constructs a whole persona in his head for this boy toy he's playing, and while he himself doesn't get lost in it, he does inadvertently seduce Arthur with it. Then it's Arthur who has a hard time pulling himself out of the charade when the evening is over.

But Jimmy—Jimmy wouldn’t pay much attention to that, and Eames doesn’t either, concerning himself instead with sipping carefully at his drink and tilting his body softly into Arthur’s.

The companion story helenish wrote with this, Untitled, redux, isn't really about subspace but does heavily feature boy toy roleplay by Arthur when one of Eames' associates comes by and when they're alone afterwards (though be warned for noncon fantasy and jokes).




Of course, there's a slew of fics where one or both characters work themselves into a submissive or dominant headspace for the sake of roleplay. The previously recced stories about age roleplay are good examples, as is one I ended up saving for this post, where Eames likes it when Arthur drinks to loosen up and pretend he's a student - Might Be Laughing a Bit Too Loud by the_ragnarok.




any eventuality by starlingthefool features an Eames who knows what he likes—namely masochism, being dominated, penetrating and not being penetrated—discovering a good complement in Arthur. Kink negotiation and a very good night ensue. Among other things, this excellent story demonstrates the ease with which Eames can slip into submissive headspace when he's in just the right sort of situation; although, as he explains to Arthur later, it takes a special confluence of factors to produce that situation.

Eames barely has time to take a breath before Arthur’s weight is pressing into his back, and Arthur’s hand is in his hair, pulling on it painfully. “You breathe a word of this to anyone, you piece of shit, and I will tear you apart.”

Eames’ reaction is probably less than appropriate, considering the circumstances. All he can do is make a strangled sort of sound as his blood abandons his brain for parts further south.

It’s not like he can help it, though. First that porn, and now the hair-pulling and that voice--

“Do you hear me, Eames?"

“Arthur--” It’s a struggle not to thrust into the carpet. Especially when Arthur yanks on his hair.

“Have I got your attention, Mr. Eames?”

“Jesus, yes--”

Judging by Arthur’s face, when he flips Eames onto his back, the last thing he’s expecting to see is Eames’ erection pressing against the line of his trousers.

In this untitled and anonymous fill, Arthur sinks further and further into himself, content, over the course of a long session with Eames. It's about relaxing into pain, not submitting to dominance as such, but it still fits within the theme here.

[Arthur's] whole body is trembling, but especially his arms. He's still murmuring, "Yes, yes," and shifting his hips into the mattress. When he turns his face to the other side, to try to ease his muscles, Eames finally puts the whip down and pushes Arthur's hair out of his eyes, checking him carefully. His eyes look like they're fixed on something in the distance, something that Eames can't see.

"Arthur," he says, gently.

Arthur keeps staring off into nothingness and says, "Yes, yes."

"Arthur."

He rouses a little, comes back to himself and says, "Yes, I'm fine. I'm okay." His breath hitches on every inhale, shakes on every exhale.

Many fics show Eames slipping into a different headspace than his own when he's forging. Sometimes it's explicitly submissive or plain old sexual; other times it's not. Something really interesting about Paparazzi by maybe77 is a bit in the middle—which is the reveal of a past event that precipitated the whole piece—wherein Eames forges himself into a girl in a dream with a predatory mark and gets so immersed in the part that he forgets he can rescue himself from an assault.

In a flash Arthur had Eames in his arms, stroking the long blond hair, making soothing little shushing sounds against Eames’ ear. After a few minutes he felt the shift as Eames morphed back to his own body. But Arthur didn’t let him go, and Eames didn’t pull away.

In the lengthy and well-executed story Kiss Trick by the_ragnarok, which involves an intricate con and tricky relationship dynamics between an asexual person and a sexual person, Eames creates a character who's so strong he has a hard time pulling himself back to the surface.

Eames comes to, blinking, shaking himself mentally until he's lost all traces of Alex. Some forges are stronger than others, settling on you with some strange affinity that makes them harder to see through, but also harder to untangle one's self from. Eames doesn't think he'll use her again. That way madness lies.

Madness, and stories like andrealyn's Darling, Don't Fade On Me, where Eames' mind has splintered into all his forges. Alas, there are too many non-subspace headspace fics to go into right now. (See for another example gyzym's Believe Me If You Can (The House at Pooh Corner), where the characters' minds shift and fuse with the characters they're forging the longer they stay in the dream. It is the creepiest crack I have read.)




SGA

Let us finish up with a few from SGA, as we have been doing. Except, ugh, we are on page 7 of this Word document and I am too tired to track down the many John/Rodney and Ronon/John and Caldwell/Elizabeth stories I know I have read that involve one character "taking down" the other through dominance and/or pain—getting them to a place in their head where they aren't overthinking things or stressed out or defiant anymore. Just being. Just feeling. Calm.



One that does come quickly to mind is Uncontrolled Descent by isagel. John loves the arousal and free-flying feeling of being tied up for sex, but it's not easy for him to trust someone enough to let go. Rodney gets it. John takes a leap.

Soft touch of lips to lips, chaste and intimate and spinning through the sky, and John gave in, gave up, let it all go, relaxing blindly into his bonds, into Rodney’s hands.

Stopped fighting.

[…]

He existed here as this man who knelt on the floor, with his arms tied behind his back, with Rodney McKay’s cock in his mouth, with Rodney McKay’s hand in his hair, and he didn’t need to be anything else.

Not falling, but floating.

Something To Remind You by cjandre is friends-locked, but I'd like to recommend it to you anyway as a memorable example of Rodney needing someone to make him come so his brain will stop buzzing and he can fall asleep. It's math and power play and a bit of cross-dressing.

This wasn't about Gaul, or death, or vampiric hordes coming to suck out everyone's life unless Rodney could come up with a way to save the day.

It wasn't about any of that.

It was about turning off his brain for just a little while.

It was about sensation.

And so we don't end on a locked fic: Perhaps the most wonderful thing about Like She Owns Him by anonymous—in which John gets tugged in fits and starts into submission during a mission to a sex-slave-owning culture with Sam Carter not because it's unnatural for him but because it's so natural and he doesn't want people to know—is the aftermath/aftercare scene, when John needs time to resurface, is trying to act normal but can't, and Sam is there to draw him back, to gentle him through it.

"You're okay, John," Sam says, and she cups his shoulder. "You're home."

John wants to lean against her hand, but the rules are different here. He has to remember that. "Yeah," he says. It comes out kind of rusty.

Hope you find some of these interesting. Any other recs?

My Bingo card

Comments

[anatsuno.livejournal.com]

I read this post right before sleep yesterday and it made me grin and grin. I love your recs omg. <3 Thank you.

[bironic.livejournal.com]

Oh, good! I'm very glad (and glad someone read it, heh).

[roga.livejournal.com]

Ooooh thank you. Subspace is one of my faaavorites ♥. (And the best way you could have used to get me to read Inception so far! :D)

I have a few Bandom recs, but I am too tired to dig them all up right now. BUT, my first go to one would probably be fictionalaspect's Amateur Cartography, a story about Brendon slowly figuring out his kinks through (what begins at least as a) non-sexual D/s relationship with Spencer, who agrees to help Brendon experience subbing, since it's safer than with a stranger, and Spencer has some experience from before. Brendon's excited and nervous and doesn't even know he's going to go under until he does, and it's amazing, and keeps getting better, with lots of long, detailed scenes followed by aftercare. The first time, before they even start doing anything, Spencer just ties Brendon up, as a sort of test, for fifteen minutes. It takes Brendon time to relax, but finally he just slips under, without even knowing what it means yet:

Spencer opens the door and crosses the room quietly, at fifteen minutes on the dot. "Hey," he says.

Brendon opens his eyes and looks up at him. "Hey," he returns, smiling slightly. Spencer's really tall from this angle. Brendon's kind of...floaty. It's not a bad feeling. It's kind of hard to resist rubbing his face against Spencer's thigh.

Spencer slides down onto the floor, so he's facing Brendon, knees up and forearms wrapped around them. "So," Spencer says. "How's things?"

Brendon nods happily. "Good." The movement makes his arms shift and pull again. It feels nice.

"You like it?" Spencer says.

"Yup," Brendon says. He lets out a breath that's not-quite a sigh. It's kind of hard to concentrate like this, but whatever.

Spencer frowns. "Did you smoke up while I was gone? How would you even—" He pauses.

Brendon grins. His legs are starting to tingle now, just a little bit, like a soft echo of pins and needles. He doesn't think it has anything to do with his arms, though. It's just that full body awareness, like he's suddenly discovered he has hips and hands and thighs. It makes him want to crawl over to Spencer, except he's on the couch and Spencer's on the floor and he'll absolutely fall on his face if he tries it with no hands.

"You sure you're okay?" Spencer says. He reaches out, and tugs on Brendon's jaw a little, forcing Brendon to look straight at him.

"Mmmhmm?" Brendon says. He raises his gaze, sleepy-eyed, relaxed. He wonders if he looks any different. Apparently he does, because Spencer's eyes widen almost comically.

"Wow," Spencer says, softly. He looks—pleased, almost. Pleased and amazed, and it makes something happy burn low in Brendon's chest. Then he seems to shake himself out of it a bit, dropping his hand and saying "Okay, so. We'll talk about this later then, I guess."

[msilverstar]

Wow, what a great post, those are my favorite Inception fics by far so clearly we are on the same wavelength.

I think you might like Shaenie's Lotrips Convergence series, especially chapter 3 from the sub's POV, Catalyst:

"Tell me what you saw, Dominic. Tell me what brought you in here, all locked and cocked and ready to go off. Tell me what I want to know," Billy's tongue was hot and persuasive against Dom's jaw, "and I'll fuck you 'til you scream."

Dom shuddered at that, at the offer of it, the way Billy's voice was like some thick, rich liquid, clinging to Dom's skin, something hot, burning him, making him whimper and twitch, and Dom never felt helpless, like this. Not quite. It was neither helpless nor powerful; it was both, some kind of twisted combination that Dom needed and there had never been anyone better at giving it to him than Billy. And he wanted to give in, wanted to, yes, but there was that other need, too, the need to push back, and Billy knew how to give him that, too.

[krytella.livejournal.com]

Great recs -- love your comments. Not surprised to find that I've read all the Inception stories you rec'd :) The way that different writers convey headspace is fascinating, and I think the stories you chose are all wonderful and show different facets of the headspace/subspace concept.

[cjandre.livejournal.com]

Hi! thanks for the rec of Something to Remind You. I wanted to let you know that it is available on AO3 now, for those who don't want to deal with friending. The sequel is available as well.

http://archiveofourown.org/works/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&query%5Btext%5D=cjandre

[bironic.livejournal.com]

Oh, cool. Thanks!