Snippets: three stories I may or may not finish, and one I definitely will.
One downside of all the Exciting Life Stuff that happened this spring was that I lost the considerable writing momentum I'd worked up during the winter, and it's taking some work to get moving again. To try and get myself going again, I thought I'd post a little bit of what's in progress.
First off, the first pages of three stories in three different fandoms. I didn't plan on writing any of these, and my commitment to them varies, but I really like the ideas behind all three. Untitled and unbetaed, in chronological order of when I began them.
[An SGA AU. The situation and ideas were inspired by the fantastic documentary Unknown White Male.]
John's on his way to work when his cell phone rings. He doesn't recognize the number, which is generally a good indication that he doesn't want to speak to whoever's on the other end. One of these days he's going to kill Weir for giving his number out to a PA, but he's just not up for the battle today, so he hits the loudspeaker button and says, "This is Sheppard."
"Um," says the voice at the other end. It's Rodney. John mentally kicks himself for not just chucking the damn phone out the window. "I don't ... really know what I'm doing, but--"
"No kidding," John snaps, downshifting as he accellerates up the on-ramp, phone clamped between his left hand and the steering wheel. "I've got a job, McKay, so I really don't have time for--"
There's a weird noise from over the speaker. "McKay?" Rodney says. "Is that ... I'm--McKay?"
He sounds strange, sort of ... lost, and John holds up the phone to stare at it for a moment. "Are you drunk?" he asks suspiciously. "If you're calling me to play some solipsistic game of twenty questions--"
Rodney blurts out, "I'm in a hospital in Santa Barbara," and John wrenches his car across three lanes of traffic and leaves half the tread of his tires on the shoulder as he hits the brakes. "... Hello? Are you there? I heard--"
"I'm here," John says, heart pounding loudly as the traffic streaks by, horns blaring, "I'm here, just tell me what happened."
"I don't know," Rodney says, "I don't know, I've been here for days and I can't remember anything and this is the first number I--" He makes that choked sound again and John suddenly realizes that Rodney's crying. "Can you ... can you tell me who I am?"
"You're Rodney," John says, "You're Rodney McKay, oh Jesus--"
"Can you come get me?" Rodney says, desperate and kind of broken, and John says, "Of course, of course I can," and "I'm John--tell them John Sheppard is coming to get you," and he makes Rodney give the phone to a doctor, tells him Rodney's name and his own. He gets the address and plugs it into the GPS one-handed, and then Rodney's back on the phone and John has to promise him two more times before he'll hang up. He's already northbound on 101 before he calls Weir ("But it's the Jolie-Pitts," she protests, and John snaps, "I don't care, family emergency, tell them to fly their own damn plane--"). He doesn't drop below 90 mph for the next hour, changing lanes like a maniac, and he makes it from LA to Santa Barbara in 67 minutes flat.
*
[BSG (spoilers through S2's 'Sacrifice'). Started because I really dig Kara Thrace -- not that I'd want her within spitting distance of me if she were a real person, but she's a kind of fucked up and interesting that few female characters are. And because I've always had a secret love for stories that happen in dreams.]
The night she kills Lee Adama, she dreams.
He told her once that his dreams almost never had words in them, that everything was bright and in slow motion, and words were irrelevent. --It's not as poetic as it sounds, he said when she stared at him over the bottle. --Last night I had an argument with my father because I bet the ignition key to Galactica on the All-Colonies pyramid semi-finals. We just didn't have to talk to do it.
--There is something deeply wrong with you, she said, and let the Chief's rotgut burn another hole in the back of her throat.
His cheeks were pink; embarrassed that he'd said anything, or maybe it was just the alcohol. --Yeah, well. I suppose people talk in your dreams.
--Not so much, she said. --It's kind hard to hear anything over the sound of me shooting them.
His eyebrows flickered upwards, and he opened his mouth, turned his head a little to the side so he could look at her from a different angle. Knocked his shot back and waited for her to say something.
She snickered. --My gods, you're easy to wind up.
He tapped his fingertips against the glass, face frozen like his smile had gotten lost on the way out the door. --Kara?
Lately they went through this anytime they talked for more than forty-five minutes. It was like he was always waiting for her to slip up and say ... who knew what, but he'd latch onto the randomest comments and hold to them, no matter how obvious it was that she was yanking his chain. Like they were in the cockpit of a hit Viper and he was watching the cracks splinter through the glass, spreading under the pressure. Waiting for the whole thing to blow.
--Really? she asked.
--Really.
She tipped the bottle up to her lips and took a long swallow, wiped her mouth on her sleeve.
--I don't dream, she said.
That wasn't true either. She does dream, once a week or so, and every time they are crisp and precise to the last detail. None of that comfortingly surreal shit everyone else reports: childhood summer cabins, old teachers striking up conversations in the ship's showers, faceless sex. Her dreams are more lucid than her life is.
It's funny like a bullet to the head.
*
[SPN (no spoilers, gen). I have no idea how I started writing this story, and I'm totally not equipped to do it. Unfortunately, I love where it goes and what it ends up being about, so I think I'm going to have to figure out how to pull it off.]
It's like the set-up for a joke: what do you get when you cross an illiterate separatist militia with an occult bookstore?, only the punchline isn't funny. Eighty men at least, triple their body weight in ammo, holed up in Buttfuck, Illinois so they can kill and resurrect themselves and take down the government as an army that won't die. They scale the walls of the compound, drop low when they land, but there isn't so much as a twitch from the night around them. No guards; the outer buildings are empty as shells. When they check the armory, the guns are gone but the body armor's racked by size. It sets the hairs on Dean's neck on end, obviously wrong in a way he can't interpret.
Two minutes later, they climb through the kitchen window in Kevlar and find out why it's so fucking quiet: everyone's already drunk the bad Koolaid. Room after room in the central building and all of them full of bodies, faces wiped clean of vomit, guns crossed on their chests. Theirs wasn't the kind of childhood where you kept count, but Dean can't remember seeing this many corpses at once before, and he's sure Sam hasn't. Glock at the ready, he stoops to press two fingers to a throat. Still warm. No pulse.
"Someone's still alive," Sam says, and Dean looks up at him. Sam's expression is too sharp for anything as naive as denial, or as dumb as hope. What Dean sees is calculation, as Sam looks over the ordered ranks of the dead.
They pad up the halls past barracks and bathrooms, what looks like a closet full of homemade C-4. Dean pivots gun-barrel first through every door, body primed and ready to go, Sam wide and silent at his back. The place is a cheap pine labyrinth, so they turn right, right, dead-end, backtrack, right, till they come a door where orange light spills around the cracks and there's a rough voice chanting. The sound always makes his guts twist: engine coughing, sugar in the tank. Glock doesn't budge, though. Dean looks at Sam, who nods, and he sets his jaw and kicks through the door.
The man behind the table empties a clip into Dean's chest without even dropping the book.
The ground slams up to meet him, and he gets a blurred sense of someone rushing past, shots, shouting and the flat splintering of bodies hitting wood, but his vision's black as a kicked-in TV and his chest feels like a crumpled can, flattened-out and piercing itself at the creases. It's hard to get his hand up and when it touches down on his chest he scorches his palm on the hot slugs. His gasp turns into a choke, twists him up in agony, but there's air back in his lungs and he fights in another breath, holds it, snakes his fingers under the bulletproof vest. It's whole and dry; no entry wounds, no blood. Jesus fuck, it hurts.
Pottery shatters and someone, not Sam, roars in fury. The air in the room is much hotter than the hall was; it sucks up his sweat, leaving his skin parched and tight.
Get the hell up, Winchester.
He hears the crack, bareknuckle KO, and realizes the whole fight's sped along without him and he's got no clue who's down for the count. He gropes for the doorframe, wishing he knew where the Glock went, climbs his hand up the wood, bites down hard on nothing, and pulls as hard as he can. Pain spears him, twisting him up off the floor as he yells through his teeth, and then Sam's there, grabbing his vest, jamming an arm around to prop him up.
He coughs again and blinks his eyes fast; they're stinging, watering. "I'm okay," he gets out. The room is dark and bright at the same time, shadows running all over like they're trying to find a place to hide, making Sam waver around the edges.
Head craned back to look over his shoulder, Sam shifts his grip on the vest. "Gotta go, Dean," he says, loud, and then hauls hard until they're both standing; it hurts like a mother, but through the haze of it Dean makes out the flames racing up the walls.
And then they're moving, Dean's arm over Sam's shoulders and Sam's mercilessly tight around Dean's ribs, going so fast that his feet are skidding and stumbling to keep up. The air is hot and their shadows sprawl out ahead of them into the dark, and it sounds like a storm, the rumble and crackle behind them, their feet, their breathing, Sam's ceaseless c'mon c'mon c'mon. Sam throws Dean up against a wall and throws himself against a door, wham wham crack, grabs him again and flings the both of them out across the grass. The cold night is a river dragging them down, and his heart batters inside his chest like maybe this time it'll break free, and then the world tilts sideways and the ground surges up and before the pain can hit him, Sam drops down over him and claps both hands over Dean's ears.
The explosion is the loudest sound Dean has ever heard, and it just goes on.
*
And finally, here's a piece of To the Dead, my HP post-war novella that I am bound and determined to finish.
3. of what you knew
As soon as the door swung shut behind him, the room flared to clinical brightness. Draco squinted against the glare.
The first thing he noticed was the smell.
The second was the high whine of containment spells, many of them, buzzing uncomfortably against his skin. They weren't there for him, but it felt like standing between a wall and heavy tapestry. Not restrictive, but smothering.
The third was Potter.
He was in the corner, heaped loosely against the wall. For a human body in a big white cube, he was hard to pick out; what registered for Draco was the greasy black smudge of his hair and an intermittent twitching. The rest of him faded right into the paint. It wasn't just the pallor, the bleached hospital pyjamas. Draco had burned corpses that gave off more of a feeling of presence.
With the width of the room between them, there wasn't much indication of where to start, but he didn't particularly want to get closer. Wand raised slightly in front of him, Draco glanced back at the one-way-view wall. "And if anything happens, I'm sure you'll be right in to rescue me," he muttered. "Fuckers."
He took his time bridging the gap, but Potter didn't move. Up close, the smell was stronger, and Draco could see the sweat stains on his pyjamas, the waxy sheen of his skin. Every few seconds, his hands spasmed and jumped, and faint tremors ran through him. It was like watching a mongrel dog in sleep. Draco stopped a foot or two away. Minutes passed.
Nothing happened. He dropped to a squat to get a look at Potter's face.
Potter's eyes snapped open.
"Shit!" Draco flailed backwards, landing painfully on his ass and elbow. The impact knocked his wand out of his hand, and he kicked against the floor to push himself after it. Grabbing wildly, he rolled for it and whipped around to point it at the corner, hand shaking.
Potter hadn't moved. His gaze was fixed on a patch of floor somewhere to Draco's left. After a few seconds, his hands twitched again.
"Fuck." Draco levered himself off the floor and shoved his hair out of his eyes, panting. His heart seemed to have lodged somewhere in the back of his throat. "Ow, fuck." He crawled awkwardly back toward the corner and waited some more. Nothing happened. Draco waved his wand in front of Potter's face--nothing--and then, cautiously, reached and poked him in the shoulder. No reaction. He poked him harder, more of a shove, and Potter lolled over and then rolled back into place.
"Well, this is just moronic." Draco shook his sleeve out of the way and took a deep breath. "Revelio."
Potter surged upwards and bowled them both over in a tangle, cracking Draco's head painfully against the floor. Howling, he clawed at Draco's face, shoved a forearm into his throat, his whole body jerking and scrabbling for purchase. Draco nearly lost his wand again, groped for it, tried to get a breath and couldn't as Potter yanked him up by his robes and slammed him down again, face contorted, mouth flecked with spittle. "Traitor! Traitor! Traitor! Trai--"
"Stupefy!" Draco choked, and Potter spasmed and collapsed over him. Draco pushed him roughly off and scuttled across the room, gasping. His robes were clammy with sweat, and the muscles of his arm shook. He tapped his wand against the latch, then banged his fist on the door until the Auror pushed it open. Draco had to grab the doorframe to pull himself upright; as he stumbled through it, he caught a glimpse of Potter slumped on the floor, quiescent again.
*
First off, the first pages of three stories in three different fandoms. I didn't plan on writing any of these, and my commitment to them varies, but I really like the ideas behind all three. Untitled and unbetaed, in chronological order of when I began them.
[An SGA AU. The situation and ideas were inspired by the fantastic documentary Unknown White Male.]
John's on his way to work when his cell phone rings. He doesn't recognize the number, which is generally a good indication that he doesn't want to speak to whoever's on the other end. One of these days he's going to kill Weir for giving his number out to a PA, but he's just not up for the battle today, so he hits the loudspeaker button and says, "This is Sheppard."
"Um," says the voice at the other end. It's Rodney. John mentally kicks himself for not just chucking the damn phone out the window. "I don't ... really know what I'm doing, but--"
"No kidding," John snaps, downshifting as he accellerates up the on-ramp, phone clamped between his left hand and the steering wheel. "I've got a job, McKay, so I really don't have time for--"
There's a weird noise from over the speaker. "McKay?" Rodney says. "Is that ... I'm--McKay?"
He sounds strange, sort of ... lost, and John holds up the phone to stare at it for a moment. "Are you drunk?" he asks suspiciously. "If you're calling me to play some solipsistic game of twenty questions--"
Rodney blurts out, "I'm in a hospital in Santa Barbara," and John wrenches his car across three lanes of traffic and leaves half the tread of his tires on the shoulder as he hits the brakes. "... Hello? Are you there? I heard--"
"I'm here," John says, heart pounding loudly as the traffic streaks by, horns blaring, "I'm here, just tell me what happened."
"I don't know," Rodney says, "I don't know, I've been here for days and I can't remember anything and this is the first number I--" He makes that choked sound again and John suddenly realizes that Rodney's crying. "Can you ... can you tell me who I am?"
"You're Rodney," John says, "You're Rodney McKay, oh Jesus--"
"Can you come get me?" Rodney says, desperate and kind of broken, and John says, "Of course, of course I can," and "I'm John--tell them John Sheppard is coming to get you," and he makes Rodney give the phone to a doctor, tells him Rodney's name and his own. He gets the address and plugs it into the GPS one-handed, and then Rodney's back on the phone and John has to promise him two more times before he'll hang up. He's already northbound on 101 before he calls Weir ("But it's the Jolie-Pitts," she protests, and John snaps, "I don't care, family emergency, tell them to fly their own damn plane--"). He doesn't drop below 90 mph for the next hour, changing lanes like a maniac, and he makes it from LA to Santa Barbara in 67 minutes flat.
*
[BSG (spoilers through S2's 'Sacrifice'). Started because I really dig Kara Thrace -- not that I'd want her within spitting distance of me if she were a real person, but she's a kind of fucked up and interesting that few female characters are. And because I've always had a secret love for stories that happen in dreams.]
The night she kills Lee Adama, she dreams.
He told her once that his dreams almost never had words in them, that everything was bright and in slow motion, and words were irrelevent. --It's not as poetic as it sounds, he said when she stared at him over the bottle. --Last night I had an argument with my father because I bet the ignition key to Galactica on the All-Colonies pyramid semi-finals. We just didn't have to talk to do it.
--There is something deeply wrong with you, she said, and let the Chief's rotgut burn another hole in the back of her throat.
His cheeks were pink; embarrassed that he'd said anything, or maybe it was just the alcohol. --Yeah, well. I suppose people talk in your dreams.
--Not so much, she said. --It's kind hard to hear anything over the sound of me shooting them.
His eyebrows flickered upwards, and he opened his mouth, turned his head a little to the side so he could look at her from a different angle. Knocked his shot back and waited for her to say something.
She snickered. --My gods, you're easy to wind up.
He tapped his fingertips against the glass, face frozen like his smile had gotten lost on the way out the door. --Kara?
Lately they went through this anytime they talked for more than forty-five minutes. It was like he was always waiting for her to slip up and say ... who knew what, but he'd latch onto the randomest comments and hold to them, no matter how obvious it was that she was yanking his chain. Like they were in the cockpit of a hit Viper and he was watching the cracks splinter through the glass, spreading under the pressure. Waiting for the whole thing to blow.
--Really? she asked.
--Really.
She tipped the bottle up to her lips and took a long swallow, wiped her mouth on her sleeve.
--I don't dream, she said.
That wasn't true either. She does dream, once a week or so, and every time they are crisp and precise to the last detail. None of that comfortingly surreal shit everyone else reports: childhood summer cabins, old teachers striking up conversations in the ship's showers, faceless sex. Her dreams are more lucid than her life is.
It's funny like a bullet to the head.
*
[SPN (no spoilers, gen). I have no idea how I started writing this story, and I'm totally not equipped to do it. Unfortunately, I love where it goes and what it ends up being about, so I think I'm going to have to figure out how to pull it off.]
It's like the set-up for a joke: what do you get when you cross an illiterate separatist militia with an occult bookstore?, only the punchline isn't funny. Eighty men at least, triple their body weight in ammo, holed up in Buttfuck, Illinois so they can kill and resurrect themselves and take down the government as an army that won't die. They scale the walls of the compound, drop low when they land, but there isn't so much as a twitch from the night around them. No guards; the outer buildings are empty as shells. When they check the armory, the guns are gone but the body armor's racked by size. It sets the hairs on Dean's neck on end, obviously wrong in a way he can't interpret.
Two minutes later, they climb through the kitchen window in Kevlar and find out why it's so fucking quiet: everyone's already drunk the bad Koolaid. Room after room in the central building and all of them full of bodies, faces wiped clean of vomit, guns crossed on their chests. Theirs wasn't the kind of childhood where you kept count, but Dean can't remember seeing this many corpses at once before, and he's sure Sam hasn't. Glock at the ready, he stoops to press two fingers to a throat. Still warm. No pulse.
"Someone's still alive," Sam says, and Dean looks up at him. Sam's expression is too sharp for anything as naive as denial, or as dumb as hope. What Dean sees is calculation, as Sam looks over the ordered ranks of the dead.
They pad up the halls past barracks and bathrooms, what looks like a closet full of homemade C-4. Dean pivots gun-barrel first through every door, body primed and ready to go, Sam wide and silent at his back. The place is a cheap pine labyrinth, so they turn right, right, dead-end, backtrack, right, till they come a door where orange light spills around the cracks and there's a rough voice chanting. The sound always makes his guts twist: engine coughing, sugar in the tank. Glock doesn't budge, though. Dean looks at Sam, who nods, and he sets his jaw and kicks through the door.
The man behind the table empties a clip into Dean's chest without even dropping the book.
The ground slams up to meet him, and he gets a blurred sense of someone rushing past, shots, shouting and the flat splintering of bodies hitting wood, but his vision's black as a kicked-in TV and his chest feels like a crumpled can, flattened-out and piercing itself at the creases. It's hard to get his hand up and when it touches down on his chest he scorches his palm on the hot slugs. His gasp turns into a choke, twists him up in agony, but there's air back in his lungs and he fights in another breath, holds it, snakes his fingers under the bulletproof vest. It's whole and dry; no entry wounds, no blood. Jesus fuck, it hurts.
Pottery shatters and someone, not Sam, roars in fury. The air in the room is much hotter than the hall was; it sucks up his sweat, leaving his skin parched and tight.
Get the hell up, Winchester.
He hears the crack, bareknuckle KO, and realizes the whole fight's sped along without him and he's got no clue who's down for the count. He gropes for the doorframe, wishing he knew where the Glock went, climbs his hand up the wood, bites down hard on nothing, and pulls as hard as he can. Pain spears him, twisting him up off the floor as he yells through his teeth, and then Sam's there, grabbing his vest, jamming an arm around to prop him up.
He coughs again and blinks his eyes fast; they're stinging, watering. "I'm okay," he gets out. The room is dark and bright at the same time, shadows running all over like they're trying to find a place to hide, making Sam waver around the edges.
Head craned back to look over his shoulder, Sam shifts his grip on the vest. "Gotta go, Dean," he says, loud, and then hauls hard until they're both standing; it hurts like a mother, but through the haze of it Dean makes out the flames racing up the walls.
And then they're moving, Dean's arm over Sam's shoulders and Sam's mercilessly tight around Dean's ribs, going so fast that his feet are skidding and stumbling to keep up. The air is hot and their shadows sprawl out ahead of them into the dark, and it sounds like a storm, the rumble and crackle behind them, their feet, their breathing, Sam's ceaseless c'mon c'mon c'mon. Sam throws Dean up against a wall and throws himself against a door, wham wham crack, grabs him again and flings the both of them out across the grass. The cold night is a river dragging them down, and his heart batters inside his chest like maybe this time it'll break free, and then the world tilts sideways and the ground surges up and before the pain can hit him, Sam drops down over him and claps both hands over Dean's ears.
The explosion is the loudest sound Dean has ever heard, and it just goes on.
*
And finally, here's a piece of To the Dead, my HP post-war novella that I am bound and determined to finish.
3. of what you knew
As soon as the door swung shut behind him, the room flared to clinical brightness. Draco squinted against the glare.
The first thing he noticed was the smell.
The second was the high whine of containment spells, many of them, buzzing uncomfortably against his skin. They weren't there for him, but it felt like standing between a wall and heavy tapestry. Not restrictive, but smothering.
The third was Potter.
He was in the corner, heaped loosely against the wall. For a human body in a big white cube, he was hard to pick out; what registered for Draco was the greasy black smudge of his hair and an intermittent twitching. The rest of him faded right into the paint. It wasn't just the pallor, the bleached hospital pyjamas. Draco had burned corpses that gave off more of a feeling of presence.
With the width of the room between them, there wasn't much indication of where to start, but he didn't particularly want to get closer. Wand raised slightly in front of him, Draco glanced back at the one-way-view wall. "And if anything happens, I'm sure you'll be right in to rescue me," he muttered. "Fuckers."
He took his time bridging the gap, but Potter didn't move. Up close, the smell was stronger, and Draco could see the sweat stains on his pyjamas, the waxy sheen of his skin. Every few seconds, his hands spasmed and jumped, and faint tremors ran through him. It was like watching a mongrel dog in sleep. Draco stopped a foot or two away. Minutes passed.
Nothing happened. He dropped to a squat to get a look at Potter's face.
Potter's eyes snapped open.
"Shit!" Draco flailed backwards, landing painfully on his ass and elbow. The impact knocked his wand out of his hand, and he kicked against the floor to push himself after it. Grabbing wildly, he rolled for it and whipped around to point it at the corner, hand shaking.
Potter hadn't moved. His gaze was fixed on a patch of floor somewhere to Draco's left. After a few seconds, his hands twitched again.
"Fuck." Draco levered himself off the floor and shoved his hair out of his eyes, panting. His heart seemed to have lodged somewhere in the back of his throat. "Ow, fuck." He crawled awkwardly back toward the corner and waited some more. Nothing happened. Draco waved his wand in front of Potter's face--nothing--and then, cautiously, reached and poked him in the shoulder. No reaction. He poked him harder, more of a shove, and Potter lolled over and then rolled back into place.
"Well, this is just moronic." Draco shook his sleeve out of the way and took a deep breath. "Revelio."
Potter surged upwards and bowled them both over in a tangle, cracking Draco's head painfully against the floor. Howling, he clawed at Draco's face, shoved a forearm into his throat, his whole body jerking and scrabbling for purchase. Draco nearly lost his wand again, groped for it, tried to get a breath and couldn't as Potter yanked him up by his robes and slammed him down again, face contorted, mouth flecked with spittle. "Traitor! Traitor! Traitor! Trai--"
"Stupefy!" Draco choked, and Potter spasmed and collapsed over him. Draco pushed him roughly off and scuttled across the room, gasping. His robes were clammy with sweat, and the muscles of his arm shook. He tapped his wand against the latch, then banged his fist on the door until the Auror pushed it open. Draco had to grab the doorframe to pull himself upright; as he stumbled through it, he caught a glimpse of Potter slumped on the floor, quiescent again.
*