WIP Meme
Just something I gakked from 
Mona1347 that I thought would be a kick:
If you happen to be working on some creative writing project, fanfiction or NaNoWriMo or what have you, post exactly one sentence (or more) from each of your current work(s) in progress in your journal. It should probably be your favourite or most intriguing sentence so far, but what you choose is entirely your discretion. Mention the title (and genre) if you like, but don't mention anything else -- this is merely to whet the general appetite for your forthcoming work(s).
Okay, I'm going to limit this to SPN WiPs or I'll be here all frakking day. Most I'll provide more than a sentence -- more of an "excerpt" -- cause I'm not very good at playing by the rules. So anyways, this is what's on my laptop at the moment, not that all of them will ever actually get written to a final state of being:
Confession
"Bless me father, for I have sinned. It’s been six years since my last confession."
"Bullshit."
"Just play along, Jim."
"Fine. What do you want to confess, asshole?"
"I’ve done a bad thing. A very, very bad thing."
"Are you proud of it?"
"Yeah, kind of."
Untitled DA/SPN WiP
"My name is John," he said. "And if you play that card with me one more time, I’m going to give you some of your teeth. Am I making myself clear?"
Alec studied him for a moment, noting the way he walked, the way he dressed. He didn’t look government, but he did look like he might be able to knock some teeth out if he tried, and he did look like he meant what he was saying.
"Sure," Alec said. "You’re clear."
"Good," John said. He gestured at the younger man. "This is Sam."
Alec smiled again. "Yeah. Sam and I met already. But we’ve already established I’m not his type, so …" he turned his gaze back to the older man, deliberate in the way his tone played the card he’d just been told not to play, "he’s shopping for you?"
My "First Friend" WiP for my First Chart
John reached out, wiped tears off his son’s cheek with his thumb. "Sometimes that kind of thing happens, Sammy. But Dean did the right thing. Family is more important than anyone else. I don’t care who was in the wrong, if this kid threatened you, Dean was right to stick up for you."
"It was my fault," Sam said again. "It’s the only friend he’s ever had, and I screwed it up for him."
"Not the only friend he’s ever had," John said gently.
"Yes," Sam corrected. "The only one. He tells you he has friends, but he never makes any. He says it’s too hard to leave them when we move, but it’s because the other kids are scared of him, mostly. He hardly ever talks to anybody at school. He doesn’t even try because he knows we’re going to move again any way."
John sighed. He felt a hundred years old, crouched here in the middle of a grocery store, listening to the life of isolation his son leads because he’s unwilling to attach himself to someone he knows he’s going to have to leave.
Riptide
He still smelled of smoke. Mike had tried to talk him into showering, but he couldn’t do it. Couldn’t force himself off the bed, couldn’t force himself to walk the ten steps from the bed to the bathroom. He’d made the trip once when the need to piss drove him to it, and it had nearly killed him, just to move, just to exist. He’d felt his way back to the bed in the dark and hadn’t moved since.
He didn’t want to ever move again. He just wanted to lie here, and not move. Forever.
A wave of grief washed through him again, as it had every fifteen to twenty minutes since he watched his wife burn to char on the ceiling of Sammy’s nursery. It dragged him under, trying to drown him, trying to kill him. It was all he could do to breathe through it, all he could do to continue to exist until it passed through him and moved on.
Rats (Working Title)
In retrospect, dragging himself to the edge of the stairs, then letting gravity do the rest was a better idea in theory than it proved to be in practice. What he’d intended to be a relatively controlled slide, on his ass, down a flight of stairs, turned into something more akin to what you saw in the movies when the bad guy pushes a chick off a landing and she tumbles ass-over-teakettle down a full storey to a busted up sprawl on the floor below, hitting every fucking stair and spindle in the railing on the way down.
He lay gasping for air, breathing blood and choking on bile, bruised and battered over every inch of him that wasn’t already busted or ripped open, and over most of the inches that were, too. He didn’t think he’d broken anything that wasn’t already broken, but he’d sure as hell made his leg a jack load worse, and what he’d done to his ribs was anybody’s guess, but they felt like maybe he’d shoved them through every organ in his body and there were poking out his back now, like ridges on a razorback, or spines on a porcupine.
And the pain was something spectacular. Something profound. Something so far out of his realm of experience to this point in life that he had to consider it just short of a spiritual awakening. Or death. Which wasn’t sounding so bad at this point as it did when he’d first considered the notion of dying while trying, of falling short in a bid to be his father, only shorter.
Fourteen was a shitty age, for the most part, especially for someone like him, who’d been shooting first and asking questions later since he was eight. Not that it didn’t have its up sides: It did. He was too young to do serious time, for one thing. And he was still young enough to get by with shit his dad couldn’t pull off; young enough to look harmless and trustworthy in ways that allowed them to accomplish things his dad wouldn’t be able to accomplish on his own.
But on the flip side, he was too young to drive, at least legally. He was too young to fuck the kind of girls who looked deliciously fuckable, or at least, they seemed to think so anyway. He was too young to play darts in any bar north of the Mason-Dixon line while he and dad discussed hunting strategies, and too young to even buy his own beer at a liquor store, even after he’d just smoked some mean-ass demon in some strip club’s back room before it got down to the down-and-dirty of chewing holes in some deliciously fuckable looking stripper who consider him too young to fuck, if not too young to save her deliciously fuckable ass.
So all-in-all, it was a shitty age. A shitty age to be. And more relevantly, a shitty age to never get beyond.
Those Who Help Themselves
"No. I’m okay." He was lying. His voice had gone so weak it was barely audible. The heart monitor beside his bed started jumping erratically. The beeping became more insistent. "I just need to rest for a while. It’s kind of hard to breathe right now."
A nurse Sam had never seen before came in to check Dean’s monitor. Her face could have been a concrete mask for all the information she gave with her expression.
Sam got up and moved out of her way as Dean opened his eyes, looking at her with a slow loll of his head to one side. "Still beating?" he asked weakly.
She didn’t answer. She pressed several buttons, and the beeping stopped. Picking Dean’s hand up off the bed, she checked his oxygen monitor, re-seated it, and asked, "Are you having trouble breathing?"
Dean closed his eyes again. "A little."
"How little?"
"Like a tank is sitting on my chest."
"Does it hurt?"
He opened one eye. "Is it only me, or is that a really stupid question?"
She lifted one eyebrow. It was a much scarier expression on her concrete mask than no expression at all. "On a scale of on to ten, with one being no pain at all and ten being the worst pain you have ever felt, how would you rate your pain?"
He closed his eye again. "Twenty seven."
"Can you be serious for just five minutes, Mr. Berkowitz?" she asked.
"I am fuckin serious," Dean hissed. His heart monitor skipped several beats, then ran three together before settling back to a regular rhythm.
My "First Hunt" First Chart WiP
"What do I do, Dad? Tell me what to do!"
Dean was shaking him. He realized it suddenly, realized the rattle of his bones in his skin was Dean trying to get his attention, needing direction so desperately, needing to know what to do, needing his teacher, needing his father ….
"I’m so sorry, Dean," John breathed. His mind was going dark in his skull. He could smell his own blood now, and he was sure that, in the tang of it, he could smell Dean’s, too. "Go, Dean," he said. "Run. Take the silver bullets. Get back to the car, and lock yourself in it."
"I’m not leaving you."
"Now Dean. Go." John twisted away from his son, trying to crawl in any direction that put distance between them. "I’m turning. I can feel it. Go before it's too late. Go, son. Go. Don’t look back."
Untitled Sammy Visions WiP
It’s a little bit like having your head blown up, from the inside out. Well, if you can really compare a sensation to something like that without actually blowing your head up from the inside out to make sure you’re making an accurate comparison. But at the very least, it felt like what Sam imagined having his head blown up from the inside out would
feel like. Only a little worse.
The Ghost of Bigfoot (Working Title)
A whistle of cold wind rose unbidden through the woods, rattling branches against one another and just generally freaking him the hell out. Greg snorted, wondering if the boogey man had a sense of humor, or if he’d just read one too damned many Stephen King novels to be creeping around in the woods after dark.
Something screeched in the distance, and Greg nearly jumped out of his skin. It was an eerie, high-pitched shriek of sound, keening to a long wail that ran his nerves up and down and up again before it faded off into nothing.
"Fuck," Greg whispered.
And then the night came apart. The wind rose like a cyclone, snarling around him as it rose through the trees, tearing branches free of their mounts and raining them down from above. The temperature dropped by ten degrees in as many seconds as a thunderous clap of sound exploded less than a foot to his right. He’d heard enough gunshots in his day to recognize it as the unmistakable roar of a full bore 240 fired at close range. Dropping his fear of broken bones like a bad habit, Greg Harmon began to run.
Possessed
It possessed him in Phoenix and rode him until his body gave out in Chicago, where it left him for dead when it moved on to somebody new. He didn’t remember any of it. Didn’t remember anything before it even. Didn’t remember anything at all about anything that had ever happened to him before he woke up as a man left for dead, jambed between a dumpster and an alley wall like so much discarded trash.
Need
Denny Bennington’s worst nightmare was coming true: The house was eating his little sister. She was screaming and screaming and screaming, and he was screaming, too; but no matter how hard he pulled, the house pulled harder.
His fingers burned and he could hardly breathe, but he held on as hard as he could and tried to tell himself it was just the dream, it was just the dream, it was just the dream.
While she screamed and screamed and screamed.
Marked
They met in a bar. It didn't take long to graduate to her motel room. He admired her tatoo. She admired his ass. It was not the stuff of which long term relationships are made.
Dean Winchester swung his legs over the edge of the bed. The floor was cold under the thin, crappy carpet. Where did he put his pants? He scanned the room, familiar enough with the creepy-odd patterns of shadows cast from neon vacancies to see as much as he needed without bothering to turn on a light.
Not that he would have turned on a light. For the moment, at least, the steady breathing behind him marked tatoo girl as sleeping. If he put his demon-hunting skills to good use, he might be able to slip out without changing that relatively convenient state of being.
Ha! Bet y'all had no idea I could keep this many balls in the air at one time, eh? LOL
Mona1347 that I thought would be a kick:
If you happen to be working on some creative writing project, fanfiction or NaNoWriMo or what have you, post exactly one sentence (or more) from each of your current work(s) in progress in your journal. It should probably be your favourite or most intriguing sentence so far, but what you choose is entirely your discretion. Mention the title (and genre) if you like, but don't mention anything else -- this is merely to whet the general appetite for your forthcoming work(s).
Okay, I'm going to limit this to SPN WiPs or I'll be here all frakking day. Most I'll provide more than a sentence -- more of an "excerpt" -- cause I'm not very good at playing by the rules. So anyways, this is what's on my laptop at the moment, not that all of them will ever actually get written to a final state of being:
Confession
"Bless me father, for I have sinned. It’s been six years since my last confession."
"Bullshit."
"Just play along, Jim."
"Fine. What do you want to confess, asshole?"
"I’ve done a bad thing. A very, very bad thing."
"Are you proud of it?"
"Yeah, kind of."
Untitled DA/SPN WiP
"My name is John," he said. "And if you play that card with me one more time, I’m going to give you some of your teeth. Am I making myself clear?"
Alec studied him for a moment, noting the way he walked, the way he dressed. He didn’t look government, but he did look like he might be able to knock some teeth out if he tried, and he did look like he meant what he was saying.
"Sure," Alec said. "You’re clear."
"Good," John said. He gestured at the younger man. "This is Sam."
Alec smiled again. "Yeah. Sam and I met already. But we’ve already established I’m not his type, so …" he turned his gaze back to the older man, deliberate in the way his tone played the card he’d just been told not to play, "he’s shopping for you?"
My "First Friend" WiP for my First Chart
John reached out, wiped tears off his son’s cheek with his thumb. "Sometimes that kind of thing happens, Sammy. But Dean did the right thing. Family is more important than anyone else. I don’t care who was in the wrong, if this kid threatened you, Dean was right to stick up for you."
"It was my fault," Sam said again. "It’s the only friend he’s ever had, and I screwed it up for him."
"Not the only friend he’s ever had," John said gently.
"Yes," Sam corrected. "The only one. He tells you he has friends, but he never makes any. He says it’s too hard to leave them when we move, but it’s because the other kids are scared of him, mostly. He hardly ever talks to anybody at school. He doesn’t even try because he knows we’re going to move again any way."
John sighed. He felt a hundred years old, crouched here in the middle of a grocery store, listening to the life of isolation his son leads because he’s unwilling to attach himself to someone he knows he’s going to have to leave.
Riptide
He still smelled of smoke. Mike had tried to talk him into showering, but he couldn’t do it. Couldn’t force himself off the bed, couldn’t force himself to walk the ten steps from the bed to the bathroom. He’d made the trip once when the need to piss drove him to it, and it had nearly killed him, just to move, just to exist. He’d felt his way back to the bed in the dark and hadn’t moved since.
He didn’t want to ever move again. He just wanted to lie here, and not move. Forever.
A wave of grief washed through him again, as it had every fifteen to twenty minutes since he watched his wife burn to char on the ceiling of Sammy’s nursery. It dragged him under, trying to drown him, trying to kill him. It was all he could do to breathe through it, all he could do to continue to exist until it passed through him and moved on.
Rats (Working Title)
In retrospect, dragging himself to the edge of the stairs, then letting gravity do the rest was a better idea in theory than it proved to be in practice. What he’d intended to be a relatively controlled slide, on his ass, down a flight of stairs, turned into something more akin to what you saw in the movies when the bad guy pushes a chick off a landing and she tumbles ass-over-teakettle down a full storey to a busted up sprawl on the floor below, hitting every fucking stair and spindle in the railing on the way down.
He lay gasping for air, breathing blood and choking on bile, bruised and battered over every inch of him that wasn’t already busted or ripped open, and over most of the inches that were, too. He didn’t think he’d broken anything that wasn’t already broken, but he’d sure as hell made his leg a jack load worse, and what he’d done to his ribs was anybody’s guess, but they felt like maybe he’d shoved them through every organ in his body and there were poking out his back now, like ridges on a razorback, or spines on a porcupine.
And the pain was something spectacular. Something profound. Something so far out of his realm of experience to this point in life that he had to consider it just short of a spiritual awakening. Or death. Which wasn’t sounding so bad at this point as it did when he’d first considered the notion of dying while trying, of falling short in a bid to be his father, only shorter.
Fourteen was a shitty age, for the most part, especially for someone like him, who’d been shooting first and asking questions later since he was eight. Not that it didn’t have its up sides: It did. He was too young to do serious time, for one thing. And he was still young enough to get by with shit his dad couldn’t pull off; young enough to look harmless and trustworthy in ways that allowed them to accomplish things his dad wouldn’t be able to accomplish on his own.
But on the flip side, he was too young to drive, at least legally. He was too young to fuck the kind of girls who looked deliciously fuckable, or at least, they seemed to think so anyway. He was too young to play darts in any bar north of the Mason-Dixon line while he and dad discussed hunting strategies, and too young to even buy his own beer at a liquor store, even after he’d just smoked some mean-ass demon in some strip club’s back room before it got down to the down-and-dirty of chewing holes in some deliciously fuckable looking stripper who consider him too young to fuck, if not too young to save her deliciously fuckable ass.
So all-in-all, it was a shitty age. A shitty age to be. And more relevantly, a shitty age to never get beyond.
Those Who Help Themselves
"No. I’m okay." He was lying. His voice had gone so weak it was barely audible. The heart monitor beside his bed started jumping erratically. The beeping became more insistent. "I just need to rest for a while. It’s kind of hard to breathe right now."
A nurse Sam had never seen before came in to check Dean’s monitor. Her face could have been a concrete mask for all the information she gave with her expression.
Sam got up and moved out of her way as Dean opened his eyes, looking at her with a slow loll of his head to one side. "Still beating?" he asked weakly.
She didn’t answer. She pressed several buttons, and the beeping stopped. Picking Dean’s hand up off the bed, she checked his oxygen monitor, re-seated it, and asked, "Are you having trouble breathing?"
Dean closed his eyes again. "A little."
"How little?"
"Like a tank is sitting on my chest."
"Does it hurt?"
He opened one eye. "Is it only me, or is that a really stupid question?"
She lifted one eyebrow. It was a much scarier expression on her concrete mask than no expression at all. "On a scale of on to ten, with one being no pain at all and ten being the worst pain you have ever felt, how would you rate your pain?"
He closed his eye again. "Twenty seven."
"Can you be serious for just five minutes, Mr. Berkowitz?" she asked.
"I am fuckin serious," Dean hissed. His heart monitor skipped several beats, then ran three together before settling back to a regular rhythm.
My "First Hunt" First Chart WiP
"What do I do, Dad? Tell me what to do!"
Dean was shaking him. He realized it suddenly, realized the rattle of his bones in his skin was Dean trying to get his attention, needing direction so desperately, needing to know what to do, needing his teacher, needing his father ….
"I’m so sorry, Dean," John breathed. His mind was going dark in his skull. He could smell his own blood now, and he was sure that, in the tang of it, he could smell Dean’s, too. "Go, Dean," he said. "Run. Take the silver bullets. Get back to the car, and lock yourself in it."
"I’m not leaving you."
"Now Dean. Go." John twisted away from his son, trying to crawl in any direction that put distance between them. "I’m turning. I can feel it. Go before it's too late. Go, son. Go. Don’t look back."
Untitled Sammy Visions WiP
It’s a little bit like having your head blown up, from the inside out. Well, if you can really compare a sensation to something like that without actually blowing your head up from the inside out to make sure you’re making an accurate comparison. But at the very least, it felt like what Sam imagined having his head blown up from the inside out would
feel like. Only a little worse.
The Ghost of Bigfoot (Working Title)
A whistle of cold wind rose unbidden through the woods, rattling branches against one another and just generally freaking him the hell out. Greg snorted, wondering if the boogey man had a sense of humor, or if he’d just read one too damned many Stephen King novels to be creeping around in the woods after dark.
Something screeched in the distance, and Greg nearly jumped out of his skin. It was an eerie, high-pitched shriek of sound, keening to a long wail that ran his nerves up and down and up again before it faded off into nothing.
"Fuck," Greg whispered.
And then the night came apart. The wind rose like a cyclone, snarling around him as it rose through the trees, tearing branches free of their mounts and raining them down from above. The temperature dropped by ten degrees in as many seconds as a thunderous clap of sound exploded less than a foot to his right. He’d heard enough gunshots in his day to recognize it as the unmistakable roar of a full bore 240 fired at close range. Dropping his fear of broken bones like a bad habit, Greg Harmon began to run.
Possessed
It possessed him in Phoenix and rode him until his body gave out in Chicago, where it left him for dead when it moved on to somebody new. He didn’t remember any of it. Didn’t remember anything before it even. Didn’t remember anything at all about anything that had ever happened to him before he woke up as a man left for dead, jambed between a dumpster and an alley wall like so much discarded trash.
Need
Denny Bennington’s worst nightmare was coming true: The house was eating his little sister. She was screaming and screaming and screaming, and he was screaming, too; but no matter how hard he pulled, the house pulled harder.
His fingers burned and he could hardly breathe, but he held on as hard as he could and tried to tell himself it was just the dream, it was just the dream, it was just the dream.
While she screamed and screamed and screamed.
Marked
They met in a bar. It didn't take long to graduate to her motel room. He admired her tatoo. She admired his ass. It was not the stuff of which long term relationships are made.
Dean Winchester swung his legs over the edge of the bed. The floor was cold under the thin, crappy carpet. Where did he put his pants? He scanned the room, familiar enough with the creepy-odd patterns of shadows cast from neon vacancies to see as much as he needed without bothering to turn on a light.
Not that he would have turned on a light. For the moment, at least, the steady breathing behind him marked tatoo girl as sleeping. If he put his demon-hunting skills to good use, he might be able to slip out without changing that relatively convenient state of being.
Ha! Bet y'all had no idea I could keep this many balls in the air at one time, eh? LOL