WIP thingy
Jul. 31st, 2009 10:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
etheratiThe WIP meme: post a snippet from each WIP you have (or as many as you want to pick). No context, no explanations.
Okay look, I don't do memes? But this one may help motivate me to finish all the shit I have laying around. So. This is a COMPLETE COLLECTION, every WIP I have on my HD, no exceptions - but I am not including stuff that is partially posted and still updating, like Brushstrokes for instance. Fandoms vary and are deliberately in no particular order.
1. It's not long before the streetlights are left behind and only the moon lights his path to the beach, and it's a wild and intoxicating feeling, dodging the shadowy fingers and pools of inexplicable darkness, dancing with that heady feeling of jumping just clear of an explosion in the last possible second or feeling the bullet clip your hair.
He knows about bullets and explosions, these days.
2. Days later and he was unsurprised to find that he’d preferred the silence. If he kept back here in the shadows and neither heard nor made sound, it was easy to be a ghost, to believe himself a shadow-echo of a person that never existed. To convince himself that he’d died with them. Nothing seemed crueler than a survival instinct so insistent as to force him to live with this emptiness, just to be alive.
Worthless.
Better to be a ghost.
3. He stared at the broken watch and the broken watch stared back, paper beginning to go grey and brown and yellow around the edges, and he wondered how long it would be before this room was regarded like some kind of a memorial - like those locked-up and dusty bedrooms of dead children, siblings, lovers, kept as they are out of a very human need to deny - at all costs.
4. He's going to die. Right now, tonight, in this place, in this last place he’ll ever be.
The realization drives away the calm, does what deliberate searching could not do - finds the fear, and flays it open and bleeding and in full view across the front of his brain. Suddenly, seconds are passing as they always have. It is not flight; it is just falling and falling and, soon enough, coming to an abrupt halt. He can feel his eyes pressing closed behind the goggles, but sight has abandoned him regardless, and when he opens his mouth around a scream trying to form, nothing will come out.
5. “He’s on hour thirty of a 24-hour leave. I’ve made the novel and revolutionary decision to be worried.”
6. So they faced the world as a unified front, and they put up a lot of masks and distractions, and eventually all the misdirection started to feel real. They stopped talking into the night, let Skaro and Vortis and the Aztecs and Romans and Crusaders fade. Let the conscious mind forget to remember.
When they dreamed of that time, they dreamed in black and white.
7. ...and he was spinning and collapsing in on himself and it was brilliant and awful and there was nothing, no light or dark, no up or down, just the hum of Everything and the pain of a body remaking itself in the image of Everything and he just wanted to go home...
8. After the sixth breath, the image comes unbidden back to mind - Daniel halfway up the fence, and his own hands reaching to grab it, a step and a half behind. One of the thugs on the other side kicking at something on the ground, nudging it towards the fence. Vision goes white and jagged. Daniel doesn't scream; just hits the ground in a heap, and the smell is indescribable.
9. They sit silently in the dark and eventually return to sleep, but the next morning he always has a feeling like they’d talked, long and low and serious, hushed voices overlapping and blending together to fill out all the quiet corners of Korea. He’s not sure why but he holds on to that feeling, grip white-knuckled and strange, for as long as he can. When it finally slips, because it’s been a bad day in O.R., or there’s been shelling, or they’ve been fighting (in that nowhere space that stretches for inches or miles between your cots, depending on how much gin you’ve had and whether you’re really angry or just poking at each other’s buttons out of boredom) or he’s just too goddamned drunk and exhausted to hold on any longer, yeah- that’s when the nightmares come back.
10. The last one though... well. He'll be cleaning up Room 407 for a long while once he finally comes off of this unauthorized break. The blood will come up easily enough, from the floor. From the bed. The linens are probably a loss. The cabinets will need scrubbing. The ceiling tiles...
He doubts he's going to be able to scrub away the screaming, echoing dully just below the conscious noise floor, for a very long time. It was the single most horrible sound he's ever heard in his life, and he's heard a lot between these walls. They don't even scream like that when they've gone thrashing insane, chewing through their restraints, rushing at the broad windows with bloody murder and something horrific and starving in their eyes. He didn't know human vocal cords could scream like that.
11. The day after the funeral, he pulled his old suit out of storage and set out walking, vaguely in the direction of Germany.
12. I am leaving a coffee house, distracted by thoughts of presenting the paper; my final requirement for graduation. I am not paying enough attention to where I am going, and I am barreled into by a whirlwind of brown canvas and pinstripes that is paying even less. The papers scatter from the folder, drift to the ground in a disorganized flurry. It is not a windy day.
Okay look, I don't do memes? But this one may help motivate me to finish all the shit I have laying around. So. This is a COMPLETE COLLECTION, every WIP I have on my HD, no exceptions - but I am not including stuff that is partially posted and still updating, like Brushstrokes for instance. Fandoms vary and are deliberately in no particular order.
1. It's not long before the streetlights are left behind and only the moon lights his path to the beach, and it's a wild and intoxicating feeling, dodging the shadowy fingers and pools of inexplicable darkness, dancing with that heady feeling of jumping just clear of an explosion in the last possible second or feeling the bullet clip your hair.
He knows about bullets and explosions, these days.
2. Days later and he was unsurprised to find that he’d preferred the silence. If he kept back here in the shadows and neither heard nor made sound, it was easy to be a ghost, to believe himself a shadow-echo of a person that never existed. To convince himself that he’d died with them. Nothing seemed crueler than a survival instinct so insistent as to force him to live with this emptiness, just to be alive.
Worthless.
Better to be a ghost.
3. He stared at the broken watch and the broken watch stared back, paper beginning to go grey and brown and yellow around the edges, and he wondered how long it would be before this room was regarded like some kind of a memorial - like those locked-up and dusty bedrooms of dead children, siblings, lovers, kept as they are out of a very human need to deny - at all costs.
4. He's going to die. Right now, tonight, in this place, in this last place he’ll ever be.
The realization drives away the calm, does what deliberate searching could not do - finds the fear, and flays it open and bleeding and in full view across the front of his brain. Suddenly, seconds are passing as they always have. It is not flight; it is just falling and falling and, soon enough, coming to an abrupt halt. He can feel his eyes pressing closed behind the goggles, but sight has abandoned him regardless, and when he opens his mouth around a scream trying to form, nothing will come out.
5. “He’s on hour thirty of a 24-hour leave. I’ve made the novel and revolutionary decision to be worried.”
6. So they faced the world as a unified front, and they put up a lot of masks and distractions, and eventually all the misdirection started to feel real. They stopped talking into the night, let Skaro and Vortis and the Aztecs and Romans and Crusaders fade. Let the conscious mind forget to remember.
When they dreamed of that time, they dreamed in black and white.
7. ...and he was spinning and collapsing in on himself and it was brilliant and awful and there was nothing, no light or dark, no up or down, just the hum of Everything and the pain of a body remaking itself in the image of Everything and he just wanted to go home...
8. After the sixth breath, the image comes unbidden back to mind - Daniel halfway up the fence, and his own hands reaching to grab it, a step and a half behind. One of the thugs on the other side kicking at something on the ground, nudging it towards the fence. Vision goes white and jagged. Daniel doesn't scream; just hits the ground in a heap, and the smell is indescribable.
9. They sit silently in the dark and eventually return to sleep, but the next morning he always has a feeling like they’d talked, long and low and serious, hushed voices overlapping and blending together to fill out all the quiet corners of Korea. He’s not sure why but he holds on to that feeling, grip white-knuckled and strange, for as long as he can. When it finally slips, because it’s been a bad day in O.R., or there’s been shelling, or they’ve been fighting (in that nowhere space that stretches for inches or miles between your cots, depending on how much gin you’ve had and whether you’re really angry or just poking at each other’s buttons out of boredom) or he’s just too goddamned drunk and exhausted to hold on any longer, yeah- that’s when the nightmares come back.
10. The last one though... well. He'll be cleaning up Room 407 for a long while once he finally comes off of this unauthorized break. The blood will come up easily enough, from the floor. From the bed. The linens are probably a loss. The cabinets will need scrubbing. The ceiling tiles...
He doubts he's going to be able to scrub away the screaming, echoing dully just below the conscious noise floor, for a very long time. It was the single most horrible sound he's ever heard in his life, and he's heard a lot between these walls. They don't even scream like that when they've gone thrashing insane, chewing through their restraints, rushing at the broad windows with bloody murder and something horrific and starving in their eyes. He didn't know human vocal cords could scream like that.
11. The day after the funeral, he pulled his old suit out of storage and set out walking, vaguely in the direction of Germany.
12. I am leaving a coffee house, distracted by thoughts of presenting the paper; my final requirement for graduation. I am not paying enough attention to where I am going, and I am barreled into by a whirlwind of brown canvas and pinstripes that is paying even less. The papers scatter from the folder, drift to the ground in a disorganized flurry. It is not a windy day.
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no subject
Date: 2009-08-01 08:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-01 09:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-02 03:54 am (UTC)Whatever #4 is supposed to be hit this reader like truck at full speed, and I really, really needed to break my comfort level and actually COMMENT because you deserve to know that.
no subject
Date: 2009-08-02 03:58 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-02 04:25 am (UTC)Thank you! It's interesting, reactions to these kind of make me think about which ones to actually finish first haha.