It's completely weird, but I love it. I guess it's the same thing, for me, as people who want to write, like, an AU of Hitchhiker's Guide and put Sam and Dean in it. Or, like, make them pirates or something.

I think you can do AUs or fusions with varying level of success. The current Hitchhiker's D/C fusion I'm reading has nothing to do with most of SPN. Good Gabriel, decent 2014!Cas, no relevance to our Dean or Sam (the paranoid cyborg???).

It's a really pretty fusion, but increasingly I feel it has nothing to do with the show I love, and that it's celebrating Jensen and Misha teenaged faces than anything else.

I know, I've been guilty of some definite schmoop in my time, but I think to think there's Dean and Cas in it, other than just my struggles for likeness.

She goes back to the show sometimes, but it's pretty clear she's found a happy place away from some of the messy parts of it.

I like AUs where the core of the characters is still intact. Like the mafia soup kitchen fic. Dean was still so Dean, and Cas was so believably Cas (and other and inscrutable), that the different surroundings didn't pull me out of it.

Yeah, that's the ticket.

Damn, I miss that fic. God, I loved it.

When people go AU so they can unimpeded tell the storybook romance of a Hunter and his Angel then all my moorings are lost.

Translating the Winchesters into a Mafia family was very entertainingly done, and Sam was amazing.

I have gotten a strange attraction to pornstar AUs, which very rarely have any grounding in anything, but at least you can get the foreplay and conversation out of the way quickly.

Still, if Dean loves his brother deeply (but, ah, not that deeply), I can apparently swallow a lot.

(I just finished reading this straightshooter.com one for the second time. I am actually ashamed.)

Link?

I prefer hustler!Dean, but usually younger, and therefore there's no Castiel, and it's usually all angst, no porn.

Which seems horrible, written out like that.

Dean Winchester, Straight Shooter. It brought happiness. And...something.

I've seen teen hustler Dean both with canon Cas timetravelling, and therefore not really within AU, and some older businessman/younger Dean, but I'd be damned if I could track it down now.

And I do remember a pretty angsty one where Cas is in a crime family and Dean is one of their hookers. But I'm so out of the habit of bookmarking these days.

And something, huh? I can imagine.

The hustler!Dean that broke me was the one with John, where they didn't know who they were to each other -- Dean had been given up to the system after Mary and Sam, too, died in the fire .

Absolutely perfect and heartbreaking and of course squirmy because they have no idea. Not a fic for everyone, obviously. What I loved was John introducing Dean to the life of a hunter, and taking care of him in his own way.

I skimmed that one, because I wanted to know, but I didn't want to feel.

I sobbed at the end, so.

I should not be reading this fic right now. And yet.

It's kind of...distracting.