post the two-hundredth: FIC!!!
Let's see...I've had this journal now for (*has to go look*) not quite two years, and I am only just now reaching my two-hundredth post, which would be this one, obviously.
I wanted to have something ficcish, to celebrate, but me being me and therefore terminally unable to finish anything, I decided to bring you odds and ends of a few of my various WIPs, and a bit of something that got abandoned in the attempt.
Anyway.
Now We Are Two
Bits of a not-really-gen-not-quite-shippy thing with Ron and Ginny I began long, long ago. War-era. Harry and Hermione have died, and Ron and Ginny are stuck in hiding together in a wee little cottage somewhere in Scotland. This originally had a weird, incest-y feel to it, but once I figured out where it was going the tone resolved itself rather nicely. Heavy on the dialogue, which is unusual, for me.
There was a cat, ash-grey with a raspy, plaintive voice, that had come from nowhere he could explain. At first he'd wanted to get rid of it - it could be an Animagus, he said, a spy - but at his complaints Ginny gathered the amimal into her lap and began feeding it bits of egg from her plate. It spent the quiet mornings after that with them, dozing under Ginny's chair, occasionally batting at Ron's ankles in hopes of a saucer of milk or a piece of kipper.
*
"How many girls have you been with, Ron?"
"You mean how many I've slept with?"
"Yeah."
"Two."
"Oh." Ginny paused. "Lavender told everyone about the two of you back then. Who's the other? Hermione?"
"No," Ron said, and then looked at her disbelieving expression. "Alright, yeah. She didn't tell you?"
"She stopped telling me things after you three went away together."
"Oh." Ron studied the freckles on his arms.
"I got the impression that something had happened she didn't want to talk about."
"More or less." Ginny fixed him with a piercing gaze. She looked at him for several long moments, scrutinising, and finally she spoke.
"So, how many boys?"
"What?" Ron looked up quickly, feeling colour come into his face.
"How many boys have you slept with?" He could feel her looking at him still as he stood up and walked idly over to the window, looking out as he considered her question. Snow blanketed everything he could see. .
"One."
"Harry?"
"Yes."
*
"What about you, Gin?
"What, you really want to know? And after all the fuss you made over me snogging Dean?"
"I just told you my entire, pitiful sexual history. I can handle it."
"Fine." Ginny took a breath. "Just the one. And I think you can guess who."
"Really? I never..."
"Not when everyone thought we were doing it. It was after. Fleur and Bill's wedding, actually. We lost our virginity to each other on the floor of your room." The stove popped, and both their heads turned at the noise. "He wasn't half as drunk as everybody said he was."
"He - he never said he'd...he never told us. I didn't know, Gin."
"Told me he loved me and everything." She paused, cradling her mug in her cupped hands like an egg. "Do you think he did? Not like he loved you and Hermione, I know, but...he must have. Sometime."
"He loved you," Ron told his sister softly, watching as his breath fogged the glass. He used his finger to draw a frowning face in the condensation before the warmth of the room could make it fade away.
*
"It wasn't just me," he said at last, his voice seeming very loud and very clear in the space between them. "Harry slept with her too - with Hermione. And with me. We were together, the three of us. I think that's why she didn't want to talk about it. There was no way we could have explained it without it sounding like it was only sex."
"It wasn't?"
"No. Hermione said it had to do with love, and Harry thought it had to do with being lonely and scared shitless, but I didn't care what they said as long as it felt right that we were together like that. It was right, you know."
"What would you have done if they'd lived?" Ginny asked him, curiously, callously.
***
Birds Fly South
This fic is the bane of my fandom existence. I've been working on it for more than a year, but I can't seem either to finish it or put it away. The subject matter is dear to my heart, and there just isn't enough realistic trio fic out there to suit my tastes. So slaving away it is.
Looking back, what she found most curious about her time in the blue house was how it coincided with the point in her life during which she hardly slept at all, rest plundered by chronic insomnia and replaced with a ceaseless desire to wander, to feel and hear and consume to textures of her wide-eyed nights, to learn the topography of the dark as well as she knew the gleaming day.
Neither Harry nor Ron can recall this; only that they sometimes woke to lavish breakfasts, or that Hermione's bed was sometimes uninhabited and undisturbed if they went to rouse her in the morning. She forgives them this admittedly unimportant lapse in memory - after all, they were just then beginning to discover what it meant to me free and young and heroic, and the times when she was making her explorations were the times when they were learning each other.
It's difficult to articulate why she feels so much older than other people her age; it's not only the war, but also the stolen hours when she was alive, aware, and they slept on, wearing their dreams about them like an armour of youth.
***
Islands
A saccharine James/Lily piece that never really got off the ground, though I thought it had some delicious lines.
"Some things," she says, pushing her hair off of her face and fixing him with her fathoms-deep green gaze, "you can't understand unless they happen to you."
*
He tries to understand, he does. After they've made love he looks carefully at her body, which, despite having palmed its planes and curves in his worship of her only moments before, seems beautifully foreign, a word in a language he does not know. The sheets, crumpled, break whitely along her torso, lap at the ivory coast of her thigh, and swirl in cotton eddies around her feet. Lily has become an island, secret and mythical and fascinating in the way she is daily changing and blooming.
He can still navigate by her delicate consellations of freckles - this butterfly-like arrangement that sits just under her right shoulder, that one that looks like a malformed strawberry on the crest of her hip - but other things are new, and seem to belong to her and her alone.
That smile, for instance, with all the serenity of the Mona Lisa even in sleep, and the sudden, suprising lushness of her breasts, not that he minds. Most conspicuous of all, though, is the sloping rise, not yet larger than half a cantaloupe, that has replaced the flat plain of her stomach.
When she is awake he watches her eyes and her mouth and the straightness of her spine, sees how tall she holds herself, how proud she is in company whereas he falls over himself as always; James thinks that women should come with compasses and maps, maps of their mysteries with little red Xs that say, "you are here."
*
Sirius, of course - because he is Sirius and it is what he does - can be counted upon to make inappropriate jokes and flatter Lily shamelessly, and Remus counted upon to be a counterpoint to Sirius and congratulate sincerely.
Some things never change.
"No, really," whispers Sirius, when he and James are in the kitchen doing the washing up after a Sunday pot roast, "what's it like, knowing you're going to be someone's dad?"
What James wants to say is that it's like wandering blindfolded in the Forbidden Forest, that it's exhilarating and terrifying and more than a little surreal. What James says when he opens his mouth is, "what's it like snogging Moony on a regular basis?", and then Sirius grins and kicks him in the shins, and any more questions are lost in the epic soap bubble war that ensues.
***
The Jumping-Off Point of God
I'd not written slash in a while, and I wanted to do something unexpected with a character I'd not written much before, and I ended up with a Harry/Neville that takes place in two different times, first during the war, when Neville and Harry have a thing, and second post-war, when Harry's died and Neville's living with Hermione, who's gone a bit mad. This fic does things I don't expect it to, sometimes, but I think it's going to be beautiful when it's done.
The longer he knows her, it seems, the more and more beautiful she seems to become. She is not classically lovely; her hair still frizzes out as it has always done, and she's got lines in her brow, now, from frowning and squinting as she grapples with difficult texts. She escaped the war with only a few scars, ragged silver lines that he sees only when she has her clothes off and is lying in his arms.
Most of the women they know would call her plain, though they like her well enough, but there is something wonderful and uncomplicated in her most unguarded look, in her smile, that draws him to peer at her again and again, the way one does a painting, or a poem.
He still watches her dress in the mornings from the warmth of their bed, with the gentle excitement of a new lover. He is still pleased by the shape of her thights, the sight of her small breasts, and always longs to remover her sensible knickers just as she is putting them on.
*
He would like to take her away, hide her between two market stalls in a gilded and humming bazaar, see the blazing aureole of her hair against moist blue mountain light. Walk with her between sand and city, waiting for the dust storms to come in.
*
The last decent picture of him in public circulation seems to have been taken when he was sixteen or seventeen, on the train home from school. That would have been just before the war, Neville knows, watching the way the Harry in the photo tugs at the loose neck of his t-shirt, his grin somewhat strained, but genuine all the same. Now and then he settles back to look out the window, or leans over to give a friendly kiss on the cheek to a laughing Hermione. Neville himself had been just off to Harry's left, only his scabbed elbow visible, and if he watches long enough, looks hard enough, he'll catch a moment, a mere splinter of time, where Harry's fingers brush that elbow.
It might have been a careless touch, an accident. It doesn't happen often, and it is only because Neville looks - because he knows - that he sees.
*
He likes best the moment when she lifts her hair on top of her head so that she can wash the back of her neck, and envies the cool palmful of water that touches her there, trickling slowly between her shoulderblades to the curve of her round arse. When she shivers, he shudders as if it had been him.
It is the moment that best defines her for him; not her books, not her voice or her hands or her cleverness, but that one moment repeated many times, the care and detail of it, the unintended eroticism.
***
Well, I'm off to my creative writing class. Toodles! ♥
I wanted to have something ficcish, to celebrate, but me being me and therefore terminally unable to finish anything, I decided to bring you odds and ends of a few of my various WIPs, and a bit of something that got abandoned in the attempt.
Anyway.
Now We Are Two
Bits of a not-really-gen-not-quite-shippy thing with Ron and Ginny I began long, long ago. War-era. Harry and Hermione have died, and Ron and Ginny are stuck in hiding together in a wee little cottage somewhere in Scotland. This originally had a weird, incest-y feel to it, but once I figured out where it was going the tone resolved itself rather nicely. Heavy on the dialogue, which is unusual, for me.
There was a cat, ash-grey with a raspy, plaintive voice, that had come from nowhere he could explain. At first he'd wanted to get rid of it - it could be an Animagus, he said, a spy - but at his complaints Ginny gathered the amimal into her lap and began feeding it bits of egg from her plate. It spent the quiet mornings after that with them, dozing under Ginny's chair, occasionally batting at Ron's ankles in hopes of a saucer of milk or a piece of kipper.
*
"How many girls have you been with, Ron?"
"You mean how many I've slept with?"
"Yeah."
"Two."
"Oh." Ginny paused. "Lavender told everyone about the two of you back then. Who's the other? Hermione?"
"No," Ron said, and then looked at her disbelieving expression. "Alright, yeah. She didn't tell you?"
"She stopped telling me things after you three went away together."
"Oh." Ron studied the freckles on his arms.
"I got the impression that something had happened she didn't want to talk about."
"More or less." Ginny fixed him with a piercing gaze. She looked at him for several long moments, scrutinising, and finally she spoke.
"So, how many boys?"
"What?" Ron looked up quickly, feeling colour come into his face.
"How many boys have you slept with?" He could feel her looking at him still as he stood up and walked idly over to the window, looking out as he considered her question. Snow blanketed everything he could see. .
"One."
"Harry?"
"Yes."
*
"What about you, Gin?
"What, you really want to know? And after all the fuss you made over me snogging Dean?"
"I just told you my entire, pitiful sexual history. I can handle it."
"Fine." Ginny took a breath. "Just the one. And I think you can guess who."
"Really? I never..."
"Not when everyone thought we were doing it. It was after. Fleur and Bill's wedding, actually. We lost our virginity to each other on the floor of your room." The stove popped, and both their heads turned at the noise. "He wasn't half as drunk as everybody said he was."
"He - he never said he'd...he never told us. I didn't know, Gin."
"Told me he loved me and everything." She paused, cradling her mug in her cupped hands like an egg. "Do you think he did? Not like he loved you and Hermione, I know, but...he must have. Sometime."
"He loved you," Ron told his sister softly, watching as his breath fogged the glass. He used his finger to draw a frowning face in the condensation before the warmth of the room could make it fade away.
*
"It wasn't just me," he said at last, his voice seeming very loud and very clear in the space between them. "Harry slept with her too - with Hermione. And with me. We were together, the three of us. I think that's why she didn't want to talk about it. There was no way we could have explained it without it sounding like it was only sex."
"It wasn't?"
"No. Hermione said it had to do with love, and Harry thought it had to do with being lonely and scared shitless, but I didn't care what they said as long as it felt right that we were together like that. It was right, you know."
"What would you have done if they'd lived?" Ginny asked him, curiously, callously.
***
Birds Fly South
This fic is the bane of my fandom existence. I've been working on it for more than a year, but I can't seem either to finish it or put it away. The subject matter is dear to my heart, and there just isn't enough realistic trio fic out there to suit my tastes. So slaving away it is.
Looking back, what she found most curious about her time in the blue house was how it coincided with the point in her life during which she hardly slept at all, rest plundered by chronic insomnia and replaced with a ceaseless desire to wander, to feel and hear and consume to textures of her wide-eyed nights, to learn the topography of the dark as well as she knew the gleaming day.
Neither Harry nor Ron can recall this; only that they sometimes woke to lavish breakfasts, or that Hermione's bed was sometimes uninhabited and undisturbed if they went to rouse her in the morning. She forgives them this admittedly unimportant lapse in memory - after all, they were just then beginning to discover what it meant to me free and young and heroic, and the times when she was making her explorations were the times when they were learning each other.
It's difficult to articulate why she feels so much older than other people her age; it's not only the war, but also the stolen hours when she was alive, aware, and they slept on, wearing their dreams about them like an armour of youth.
***
Islands
A saccharine James/Lily piece that never really got off the ground, though I thought it had some delicious lines.
"Some things," she says, pushing her hair off of her face and fixing him with her fathoms-deep green gaze, "you can't understand unless they happen to you."
*
He tries to understand, he does. After they've made love he looks carefully at her body, which, despite having palmed its planes and curves in his worship of her only moments before, seems beautifully foreign, a word in a language he does not know. The sheets, crumpled, break whitely along her torso, lap at the ivory coast of her thigh, and swirl in cotton eddies around her feet. Lily has become an island, secret and mythical and fascinating in the way she is daily changing and blooming.
He can still navigate by her delicate consellations of freckles - this butterfly-like arrangement that sits just under her right shoulder, that one that looks like a malformed strawberry on the crest of her hip - but other things are new, and seem to belong to her and her alone.
That smile, for instance, with all the serenity of the Mona Lisa even in sleep, and the sudden, suprising lushness of her breasts, not that he minds. Most conspicuous of all, though, is the sloping rise, not yet larger than half a cantaloupe, that has replaced the flat plain of her stomach.
When she is awake he watches her eyes and her mouth and the straightness of her spine, sees how tall she holds herself, how proud she is in company whereas he falls over himself as always; James thinks that women should come with compasses and maps, maps of their mysteries with little red Xs that say, "you are here."
*
Sirius, of course - because he is Sirius and it is what he does - can be counted upon to make inappropriate jokes and flatter Lily shamelessly, and Remus counted upon to be a counterpoint to Sirius and congratulate sincerely.
Some things never change.
"No, really," whispers Sirius, when he and James are in the kitchen doing the washing up after a Sunday pot roast, "what's it like, knowing you're going to be someone's dad?"
What James wants to say is that it's like wandering blindfolded in the Forbidden Forest, that it's exhilarating and terrifying and more than a little surreal. What James says when he opens his mouth is, "what's it like snogging Moony on a regular basis?", and then Sirius grins and kicks him in the shins, and any more questions are lost in the epic soap bubble war that ensues.
***
The Jumping-Off Point of God
I'd not written slash in a while, and I wanted to do something unexpected with a character I'd not written much before, and I ended up with a Harry/Neville that takes place in two different times, first during the war, when Neville and Harry have a thing, and second post-war, when Harry's died and Neville's living with Hermione, who's gone a bit mad. This fic does things I don't expect it to, sometimes, but I think it's going to be beautiful when it's done.
The longer he knows her, it seems, the more and more beautiful she seems to become. She is not classically lovely; her hair still frizzes out as it has always done, and she's got lines in her brow, now, from frowning and squinting as she grapples with difficult texts. She escaped the war with only a few scars, ragged silver lines that he sees only when she has her clothes off and is lying in his arms.
Most of the women they know would call her plain, though they like her well enough, but there is something wonderful and uncomplicated in her most unguarded look, in her smile, that draws him to peer at her again and again, the way one does a painting, or a poem.
He still watches her dress in the mornings from the warmth of their bed, with the gentle excitement of a new lover. He is still pleased by the shape of her thights, the sight of her small breasts, and always longs to remover her sensible knickers just as she is putting them on.
*
He would like to take her away, hide her between two market stalls in a gilded and humming bazaar, see the blazing aureole of her hair against moist blue mountain light. Walk with her between sand and city, waiting for the dust storms to come in.
*
The last decent picture of him in public circulation seems to have been taken when he was sixteen or seventeen, on the train home from school. That would have been just before the war, Neville knows, watching the way the Harry in the photo tugs at the loose neck of his t-shirt, his grin somewhat strained, but genuine all the same. Now and then he settles back to look out the window, or leans over to give a friendly kiss on the cheek to a laughing Hermione. Neville himself had been just off to Harry's left, only his scabbed elbow visible, and if he watches long enough, looks hard enough, he'll catch a moment, a mere splinter of time, where Harry's fingers brush that elbow.
It might have been a careless touch, an accident. It doesn't happen often, and it is only because Neville looks - because he knows - that he sees.
*
He likes best the moment when she lifts her hair on top of her head so that she can wash the back of her neck, and envies the cool palmful of water that touches her there, trickling slowly between her shoulderblades to the curve of her round arse. When she shivers, he shudders as if it had been him.
It is the moment that best defines her for him; not her books, not her voice or her hands or her cleverness, but that one moment repeated many times, the care and detail of it, the unintended eroticism.
***
Well, I'm off to my creative writing class. Toodles! ♥