This is one of those rare things of mine that I can look at months later and still not want to change a thing. I didn't write it, really-- it just grew in this completely organic way, one of those lucky flashes that you get once in a blue moon. If I sat down to write this today, I probably couldn't do it, or if I did every word would be like pulling teeth. My head was so far up into this shiny shiny new playground at the time I wrote this that these guys would not get out of it no matter what I did, and I was in their heads too.

The fever was from Bones as a medical man, the kind of thing he would know about Jim and be unable to help but notice because of who he is. The freckle was just... I don't know, you're thinking really hard, hyper-focusing on something to stop from focusing on something else, and it just fit itself in there as something my Bones would do. The chin-on-shoulder just came from how I pictured them up there, easy intimacy underlaced with tension and longing but not the woe-is-me kind, a sense of inevitability about the whole thing because they just fit.

It's not so much I knew these things would work as it's that it just came into being that way. I really do wish I had a formula for making something like this happen, because (and you know I super-seriously believe it if I can say it) this is one of the best pieces I've ever done, maybe even the best, and if I could duplicate that on a daily basis I'd be unstoppable.

Er, if nothing else, a bit of insight into the Psychology of the Mercy. :P