Okay, brain, back in the saddle.
I've finally gotten fed up with this whole "not writing" thing: it's not that I can't, just that I haven't felt motivated to do it. Since apathy is generally a really unproductive mood in which to resume work on a longer project, I've decided that I'm better off writing random ficlets just for the hell out it. Expect a hodgepodge of lengths, fandoms, and intervals in between them -- I'm basically putting no parameters on these. (Also, FYI, they'll all be unbetaed.)
First up: Harry Potter, of all things, inspired by rewatching HBP with my mom and starting to reread DH. Set during the First War.
Lily stirs the cauldron: nine times clockwise with the glass rod, seven heartbeats, and two counter-clockwise strokes with the wooden spoon. Then she drains the alcohol from the wormwood beaker and adds that too. Her breath is warm and damp against the medical mask she's enchanted to filter out the vapors, which she wears at James' insistence. She could have used a charm to ionize the air before her face just as easily, but seeing the physical barrier makes him feel more secure.
As the war and her pregnancy both wax, he's gotten very literal-minded.
This is the fifteenth variation on this potion to fragrance the attic she's turned into her workshop. (The boys had suggested the basement -- over-protection again, with an adherence to the paradigm of Hogwarts that makes them unable to imagine anyone could brew anything in natural light. As though she cannot transfigure the windows black to compensate for photosensitive reactions.) The eighth was the first to produce measurable resistance to Cruciatus. The twelfth worked for longer, but the hallucinogenic effects were far too slow to wear off, though Sirius has demanded she keep her notes for that so he can re-test it recreationally. Now she's working on the arithmancy that'll key its active effects to the duration of the curse. Once the timing's fixed, perhaps she'll make a few modifications to balance out the anxiety produced by the synesthesia -- it is far easier to transmute pain, she's learned, than to block it entirely, but the light show's proved to be more than a little distracting.
Maybe half a tab of Diazepam. Worth a try just to imagine the faces Slughorn (and Severus) would make at the introduction of Muggle pharmacology.
The sprout plants a shoulder against her kidney and jabs a foot up under her ribs. She grimaces, reaching for the St. John's wort, and promises him she'll stop for tea and a meal soon. The Order members, collectively, have developed the obnoxious tendency to treat her as the symbol of life's renewal even amid the fighting. She can only box the boys' ears so many times -- Remus, when she sees him, makes the best effort, but then he has memories of his own for what it means to serve as the mascot for heroic group effort. If one more person offers to fetch her a mug of something in the middle of a strategy session, then Dumbledore or not, she's going to dump the mug right over their head. She suspects Molly feels much the same.
She slides the lid onto the cauldron and pours a liberal splash of peppermint oil into the candle wax, then tosses the mask onto the work bench and takes a deep, grateful breath of the astringent air. Her left hand rubs circles against the side of her stomach, where the sprout's head may or may not be, and he subsides into a less angular position. With her right hand, she pops a biscuit into her mouth, removes the ballpoint pen from her braid and sets it paper, sliding into the bright clarity of the refinements she's made today, changing the variables in the nested equations, jotting down some ideas to test out after lunch.
It's getting there, she thinks. After the war is over, perhaps she'll try to publish. (Cross-posted to Dreamwidth and LJ, but comments are welcome at either.)