wow and I thought I had a lot of schoolwork to finish
A meme from Quarkie who is ignoring me to work on her ~*~artses~*~ or something thought I had fallen off the internet, brought to you by my inexplicable desire to tease you with my writing.
Post a sentence (or paragraph) or two from as many of your WIPs as you want, with no explanation attached.
They are not in any particular order, mostly sorted according to how I found them.
fanfiction:
1
She could probably have him eating out of the palm of her hand-some part of her thought perhaps she already did-and yet she was shy of using her power, she who had only learned restraint because her foster father had hammered it into her brain until nothing could dislodge it.
2
When the kiss finally ended, she rested her head against his chest, fingers tightening on his arms as they wrapped around her, holding her tightly against him. She told herself it was for comfort’s sake, felt herself trembling, but he seemed content to rest as they were and so she closed her eyes and relished the relative safety. He was warm and alive, his heartbeat steady under her ear, and in her mind ran a refrain as steady as any mantra: he could die tomorrow.
and
There was nothing else to be done. It was an extreme measure, yes, one of something akin to desperation, but as she strained her toes and placed a kiss on his lips she discovered the desperation stemmed not from his rebuffs but from her very real desire to kiss him. It had nothing to do with the fact that he wasn’t listening to her-because he was, he just wasn’t thinking about what it meant-and everything to do with the fact that she wanted to take his head in her hands and kiss every crease, every scar, until he finally kissed her back.
3
Her eyes are suddenly haunted, and he understands perfectly, though he could never imagine wandering away from Neverwinter in order to heal his hurts. The war had stripped a great deal from him, and he has worked hard to win it back, alongside his fellow veterans and soldiers and knights, but he has worked in his city, physically stacking the stones and silently sharing the memories until the buildings stood tall again and the echoing screams of the dying did not haunt his dreams. In helping his city to become all it once was, all and more, he healed that part of himself that had seen the brutality of the “civilized” races, setting his faith in the laws and orders that raised them above orcs, or the other brute races of the world. He does not need to see anything greater, or more fantastic or terrible, to banish the memories; the sight of the common people of his city, walking the streets in safety, is enough to satisfy him.
4
She stared at him, and he stared right back, and somewhere in his mind it occurred to him that this was exactly the sort of moment that Tamaki would suggest taking her in his arms and making her swoon and then celebrating their romantic bliss with a kiss. And she was very tempting, even if she was dressed in a boy’s uniform and had bags under her eyes from having to wake up early and take the subway to get to school and from studying too late, even if he knew exactly what she had eaten for lunch (the same bento box as always) and could therefore imagine exactly what she would taste like (horrifically cheap sushi and day-old rice).
5
At least HK was just a droid. And while she hoped there weren't too many of them like him out there, he was, in some sense, expendable. So if she ignored him in favor of saving her own skin, well, it wouldn't be the darkest deed she'd ever committed (har dee har har).
and
"Well," he said in his kindly-old-man, don't-mean-no-harm-to-no-one voice (a lie, of course, and never comforting, because he always used it when he was most afraid of her losing it), "I don't know about the Force, but my footprints tell me we came from there," he gestured to the south, "and so I think we should be going there," and lo, there was a footpath, heading in a generally northern direction.
6
This girl was saucy, and held down her own job at the pub, and shooed him out of the house while standing in the doorway half-dressed blowing kisses as he hurried off on the next Guild assignment. It didn’t matter if he was gone weeks or months; she was always walking down the hill to meet him when he returned with a long kiss and whatever bit of armor she’d scrounged up from the mercenaries coming through town. She kissed his bruises and licked his scars and mussed his blonde hair and sang with happiness, and all he could do was stare at her and wonder what made her so confident, that she could say, “Together forever, my Hero and me.”
and
The Hero hadn’t bothered to change his title in years, though he wasn’t convinced this one fit-he had no idea who he was supposed to have liberated, or from what-and he didn’t bother to correct her about his bravery. Fighting trolls had become as much a matter of habit as most of his work, firing off an arrow, taking shelter while pulling his bowstring taut; as routine as slicing off men’s heads (sometimes he made a game of it) or hearing the screams of souls released from undeath. Being a Hero involved routine, from death to gold to women fawning over him, begging him to be theirs. Elvira Grey was just the latest in a long string of women asking for a ring, and she just happened to own her own house.
original stuff
1
One day, she meandered down a street that seemed to consist entirely of food vendors, a safe distance from the happy couple, a day just like any other day, stopping when they did so that Jason could force Cindy to eat something that looked halfway appetizing. It was during one of these stops, when she found herself leaning against a fruit stand, watching Jason hand Cindy-what was that, a snail?-watching Cindy look up at him with an expression of-amusement, yes, and suspicion, certainly (it was a snail, disgusting)-but more than that, nothing less than sheer bliss; it was in that moment, that she realized what bothered her so greatly about these trysts.
Namely, it was the fact that she had lied, however many weeks or months ago. She was jealous-not over Jason, but of Jason, of the fact that he could make her best friend smile when she could not.
and
Her mother stopped to consider a flower, as white as her gown, hanging from a vine that threaded itself through the hedge; her father watched as his wife cupped the flower in her hands and sniffed. She turned back to him, ready to continue walking, and then he suddenly ducked his head and kissed her.
And Izzy remembered, then, the look on her mother’s face as her father had pulled away: surprised, a little shy, but pleased, too, and then she had quickly kissed him back. When they parted a second time, he reached up with one hand to brush his thumb along her cheek; and then they turned, he with his hands once again behind his back, she with them dangling by her sides, and continued walking.
2
"You know, Raziel,” I said, sitting on the edge of my seat with my hands folded in my lap, “for whom those chairs are meant.”
“Hm?” he said, settling himself in more comfortably in the pink pouf.
“Pregnant women,” I said. “So that they have a properly comfortable chair to relieve the burden of all the excess weight they carry.”
“Really?” Louisa asked.
“Of course,” I said. I never told a lie. At least, not in insignificant matters.
Raziel stretched, pulling his feet onto the chair-I wrinkled my nose; he usually went barefoot, and we would have to have the chair cleaned. “Oh, I have excess weight,” he said.
Edmund, who was slightly plump, turned a bit pink at that and glared pointedly at Raziel, who was leanly built and almost disappeared in the cushions. “Really.”
“Oh yes,” he said, completely unperturbed. “The mere burden of being myself weighs so heavily upon my shoulders that I might as well be carrying a child.”
“Oh yes,” Edmund echoed, “it must be a burden, being as lazy as you are.”
3
Then came the painful day when I realized I was the dumb one, not you, and suddenly I couldn’t say anything, not even to myself. Because the problem, you see, is that when I say, “I will wait for you forever,” that means I’m the one doing all the work, while you frolic on, because you can always come back to me. If you even wanted to, which at this point was starting to look more and more unlikely, like maybe you were never going to have that epiphany I’d had so many, many days-months-years? ago. Even I couldn’t say how long it had been, because the problem with forever is that it has no beginning, no end-it just is, eternity, ongoing and everlasting.
4
The echo was startling. In my camp, if I were to sing something, it died as soon as it hit the tent walls. If I was lucky, and sang at the edges of camp, the wind might pick it up and fling it across the Desolation-but there was nothing for it to echo across. Here, my voice came back to me a hundred different ways. I experimented with singing from the tops of hills and from the little valleys in between them, and for the first time in so long, I heard voices coming back to me. They were all my voice, but as they grew fainter and fainter they sounded less like me, and if I waited I could have an entire conversation with myself, waiting until the question was faint before answering.
and
Klakmul told me I was making a mistake, clinging to my old ways. I told her to shut up. She told me friends listened, friends didn’t’ tell each other to shut up. I told her if she didn’t have anything helpful to say about my bleeding leg or the half-conscious goblin next to me, she should shut up.
Talk to him, was her suggestion. And it was so ridiculous, and stupid, and Klakmul-like, that I suddenly hurt, and that made me angry enough to clear through all the hazy pain and think.
Post a sentence (or paragraph) or two from as many of your WIPs as you want, with no explanation attached.
They are not in any particular order, mostly sorted according to how I found them.
fanfiction:
1
She could probably have him eating out of the palm of her hand-some part of her thought perhaps she already did-and yet she was shy of using her power, she who had only learned restraint because her foster father had hammered it into her brain until nothing could dislodge it.
2
When the kiss finally ended, she rested her head against his chest, fingers tightening on his arms as they wrapped around her, holding her tightly against him. She told herself it was for comfort’s sake, felt herself trembling, but he seemed content to rest as they were and so she closed her eyes and relished the relative safety. He was warm and alive, his heartbeat steady under her ear, and in her mind ran a refrain as steady as any mantra: he could die tomorrow.
and
There was nothing else to be done. It was an extreme measure, yes, one of something akin to desperation, but as she strained her toes and placed a kiss on his lips she discovered the desperation stemmed not from his rebuffs but from her very real desire to kiss him. It had nothing to do with the fact that he wasn’t listening to her-because he was, he just wasn’t thinking about what it meant-and everything to do with the fact that she wanted to take his head in her hands and kiss every crease, every scar, until he finally kissed her back.
3
Her eyes are suddenly haunted, and he understands perfectly, though he could never imagine wandering away from Neverwinter in order to heal his hurts. The war had stripped a great deal from him, and he has worked hard to win it back, alongside his fellow veterans and soldiers and knights, but he has worked in his city, physically stacking the stones and silently sharing the memories until the buildings stood tall again and the echoing screams of the dying did not haunt his dreams. In helping his city to become all it once was, all and more, he healed that part of himself that had seen the brutality of the “civilized” races, setting his faith in the laws and orders that raised them above orcs, or the other brute races of the world. He does not need to see anything greater, or more fantastic or terrible, to banish the memories; the sight of the common people of his city, walking the streets in safety, is enough to satisfy him.
4
She stared at him, and he stared right back, and somewhere in his mind it occurred to him that this was exactly the sort of moment that Tamaki would suggest taking her in his arms and making her swoon and then celebrating their romantic bliss with a kiss. And she was very tempting, even if she was dressed in a boy’s uniform and had bags under her eyes from having to wake up early and take the subway to get to school and from studying too late, even if he knew exactly what she had eaten for lunch (the same bento box as always) and could therefore imagine exactly what she would taste like (horrifically cheap sushi and day-old rice).
5
At least HK was just a droid. And while she hoped there weren't too many of them like him out there, he was, in some sense, expendable. So if she ignored him in favor of saving her own skin, well, it wouldn't be the darkest deed she'd ever committed (har dee har har).
and
"Well," he said in his kindly-old-man, don't-mean-no-harm-to-no-one voice (a lie, of course, and never comforting, because he always used it when he was most afraid of her losing it), "I don't know about the Force, but my footprints tell me we came from there," he gestured to the south, "and so I think we should be going there," and lo, there was a footpath, heading in a generally northern direction.
6
This girl was saucy, and held down her own job at the pub, and shooed him out of the house while standing in the doorway half-dressed blowing kisses as he hurried off on the next Guild assignment. It didn’t matter if he was gone weeks or months; she was always walking down the hill to meet him when he returned with a long kiss and whatever bit of armor she’d scrounged up from the mercenaries coming through town. She kissed his bruises and licked his scars and mussed his blonde hair and sang with happiness, and all he could do was stare at her and wonder what made her so confident, that she could say, “Together forever, my Hero and me.”
and
The Hero hadn’t bothered to change his title in years, though he wasn’t convinced this one fit-he had no idea who he was supposed to have liberated, or from what-and he didn’t bother to correct her about his bravery. Fighting trolls had become as much a matter of habit as most of his work, firing off an arrow, taking shelter while pulling his bowstring taut; as routine as slicing off men’s heads (sometimes he made a game of it) or hearing the screams of souls released from undeath. Being a Hero involved routine, from death to gold to women fawning over him, begging him to be theirs. Elvira Grey was just the latest in a long string of women asking for a ring, and she just happened to own her own house.
original stuff
1
One day, she meandered down a street that seemed to consist entirely of food vendors, a safe distance from the happy couple, a day just like any other day, stopping when they did so that Jason could force Cindy to eat something that looked halfway appetizing. It was during one of these stops, when she found herself leaning against a fruit stand, watching Jason hand Cindy-what was that, a snail?-watching Cindy look up at him with an expression of-amusement, yes, and suspicion, certainly (it was a snail, disgusting)-but more than that, nothing less than sheer bliss; it was in that moment, that she realized what bothered her so greatly about these trysts.
Namely, it was the fact that she had lied, however many weeks or months ago. She was jealous-not over Jason, but of Jason, of the fact that he could make her best friend smile when she could not.
and
Her mother stopped to consider a flower, as white as her gown, hanging from a vine that threaded itself through the hedge; her father watched as his wife cupped the flower in her hands and sniffed. She turned back to him, ready to continue walking, and then he suddenly ducked his head and kissed her.
And Izzy remembered, then, the look on her mother’s face as her father had pulled away: surprised, a little shy, but pleased, too, and then she had quickly kissed him back. When they parted a second time, he reached up with one hand to brush his thumb along her cheek; and then they turned, he with his hands once again behind his back, she with them dangling by her sides, and continued walking.
2
"You know, Raziel,” I said, sitting on the edge of my seat with my hands folded in my lap, “for whom those chairs are meant.”
“Hm?” he said, settling himself in more comfortably in the pink pouf.
“Pregnant women,” I said. “So that they have a properly comfortable chair to relieve the burden of all the excess weight they carry.”
“Really?” Louisa asked.
“Of course,” I said. I never told a lie. At least, not in insignificant matters.
Raziel stretched, pulling his feet onto the chair-I wrinkled my nose; he usually went barefoot, and we would have to have the chair cleaned. “Oh, I have excess weight,” he said.
Edmund, who was slightly plump, turned a bit pink at that and glared pointedly at Raziel, who was leanly built and almost disappeared in the cushions. “Really.”
“Oh yes,” he said, completely unperturbed. “The mere burden of being myself weighs so heavily upon my shoulders that I might as well be carrying a child.”
“Oh yes,” Edmund echoed, “it must be a burden, being as lazy as you are.”
3
Then came the painful day when I realized I was the dumb one, not you, and suddenly I couldn’t say anything, not even to myself. Because the problem, you see, is that when I say, “I will wait for you forever,” that means I’m the one doing all the work, while you frolic on, because you can always come back to me. If you even wanted to, which at this point was starting to look more and more unlikely, like maybe you were never going to have that epiphany I’d had so many, many days-months-years? ago. Even I couldn’t say how long it had been, because the problem with forever is that it has no beginning, no end-it just is, eternity, ongoing and everlasting.
4
The echo was startling. In my camp, if I were to sing something, it died as soon as it hit the tent walls. If I was lucky, and sang at the edges of camp, the wind might pick it up and fling it across the Desolation-but there was nothing for it to echo across. Here, my voice came back to me a hundred different ways. I experimented with singing from the tops of hills and from the little valleys in between them, and for the first time in so long, I heard voices coming back to me. They were all my voice, but as they grew fainter and fainter they sounded less like me, and if I waited I could have an entire conversation with myself, waiting until the question was faint before answering.
and
Klakmul told me I was making a mistake, clinging to my old ways. I told her to shut up. She told me friends listened, friends didn’t’ tell each other to shut up. I told her if she didn’t have anything helpful to say about my bleeding leg or the half-conscious goblin next to me, she should shut up.
Talk to him, was her suggestion. And it was so ridiculous, and stupid, and Klakmul-like, that I suddenly hurt, and that made me angry enough to clear through all the hazy pain and think.