Clips From My WiP Files - Eagle Fandom Style
The other day I began to notice that a lot of my flist was switching over to Avengers fandom, and I started worrying about what that would mean for the Eagle fandom. In the midst of all of that worrying, I realized how little I've actually contributed to Eagle fandom in the past ...oh, say, forever.
But since I don't have any finished stories to share atm, I figured I'd just go ahead and show some pieces from my never-ending WiP/Abandoned fics folder. Just to show y'all that I still love you and our fandom, even if my work isn't being shared atm.
One of my main reasons for not posting my fics has to do with my anxiety issues. It's a disability thing, definitely. But one of the strongest anxieties among the many fears that pop up is that nobody would want to read them, because they're too ooc/weird/random. Because I'm well aware that most of my works could be considered idfic, which I know is largely hit-or-miss, and, well, since the fandom is so small, I'm terrified of being ousted as 'that weird one' or something, idek, my damned anxiety is irrational.
Anywho, I figured I'd post four pieces, with some intro/explanations about the 'verse and what happened to them/why I never posted, as a sign that I still love this fandom, even if I'm more of a phantom stalker than contributor, now-a-days.
The first snippet is from an AU based on this kink meme prompt that I started way back in September. I had a few vague ideas that ended up becoming full-fledged concepts that I couldn't stay away from.
I even discussed e-mail discussed the concept with Tif, who was being awesome with helping as a content beta for me at the time (even if I never did finish/post most of the stuff, lols, shame on me).
This is from very damn near to the beginning of the fic, which had the ever-original working title of 'Killing Machine!Esca.'
If there was one thing that Esca was sure of, it was this: he was being punished. Anything else, any reasons why or questions of circumstance, were completely and utterly irrelevent. He was being punished for not fighting hard enough, for letting his guard down, and for not properly and effectively defending his Master. It didn't matter that there were hundreds of them, and that Esca was only one. He was stronger than them, better.
Or, at least, he should have been.
When he hadn't managed to keep them at bay, or even to die fighting, like a proper soldier, Esca had failed. Failed, and earned a stay in his own dungeons, with the cracked ground beneath his back, the darkness all around him, a burning throb in his arm, and a frantic pounding in his head.
This one was originally going to be my Big Bang entry, but I ran into a shitload of problems with it. First I stalled at about 12k, unsure of which direction to take - the one that would make it longer and more epic (including more fantasy world-building and hordes of monsters, probs), but might also get too idfic-y and mean I wouldn't finish in time for the reveal, or the shorter more succinct one, which would mean I'd have to rework a bunch of shit (make it less plot-y and monster-y but more romance-y) but could definitely get it done in the right time.
As I was debating that, I started reading Eot9 for the first time, and realized a lot of the character slots that I'd filled up with original characters could be used by canon, but that they'd have to be reworked (along with the plot a bit, to reflect those changes). So I felt uncertain about presenting it as it was after all that - I know that OCs are frowned upon, esp. when canon characters are scarce.
Then my comp crashed, and I was only able to find ~10.5k of what I'd had before, so I just sort of gave up. *shrugs* As things stand, I'd love to go back to it someday, but I'm just not sure if the interest is there, or if it would be way more idfic-y and deviate too much from what the original prompter wanted.
Now the second piece I'm going to provide a snippet of was actually my NaNoWriMo 2011 piece. It was, unfortunately, unfinished (even though it technically 'won' NaNo). I know what I want to happen for most of the ending (esp. the whodunnit), but once I hit 50k-ish, well, the words just didn't want to come anymore. Total writing burnout.
This one was also based off of a kink meme request, and is another that I doubt I'd post due to the level of idfic-ness and the complete left-turn it took from what the original requester seemed to want. Also, well, I'm not great at editing and it would need a lot of it to be postable.
It has the pleasant working title of "Eyes Like A Loaded Gun," and this particular section comes from early on in Chapter Two. TW: Gore. NSFW.
Marcus most certainly didn't let out an undignified yelp, or leap backwards until he nearly knocked over his tools. Nope, no way. And if the digital recorder says otherwise, well, that thing was a piece of shit, anyways, and Marcus always knew they shouldn't have gotten it. Who needed to hear him when he was sleepy and tired and grumpy, anyways?
For a brief second it was like the dead guy - not dead guy, fuck, this guy was alive - didn't even notice that he was sitting upright. He just stared off, blinking, for several long seconds, before reaching up to touch himself, his bullet holes, and the cut in his forehead. Marcus was pretty sure he winced alongside the not-so-dead-guy with each brush of his fingertips.
“Uhm," Marcus said, which was about as smooth as he was aiming for, since he was pretty sure that it came out as an awkward squawking grunt, instead of anything dignified. He was also pretty sure that he was still sprawled against his metal instruments.
The living guy - and how the fuck was he alive, Marcus had checked himself, and sure, the pulse might've been so weak that maybe Lutorius AND Uncle AND Marcus had managed to miss it, maybe, if this were a fucking movie, that was. And maybe he'd just been unconscious the whole time, like in a really heavy coma or some sort of bullshit.
But nobody took that many shots to the chest, or had that deep and bloody of a head wound and lived to tell about it.
Nobody.
Except that obviously this guy did. And he now turned towards Marcus, pinning him with his eyes, which were slowly unclouding to become an intense and deep shade of blue.
In the remainder of the 'verse there's honest-to-god soul-bonding, Fae, goblin-builders, past sexings with certain Seal Princes, Fae royalty that includes a ball suspiciously reminiscent of the ball scene in The Labyrinth if it weren't for all of the gossiping and snide Fae around, shapeshifters, and some more death, slight gore, and confusion. *shrugs* See what I mean about id-fic? But what can I say? Nano always seems to bring out my deep down writing desires.
This next one is a continuation from a stripper!Esca AU meme response that I wrote for SunServ ages ago. The original piece I wrote was titled, "You're hotter than a bunsen burner set to full power", and this piece takes place the very next day.
My file title for it is honestly, "Stripper fic v2," so, well, at least you know to be expecting the NSFW snippet ahead.
Marcus shifted, his butt sore from the hard tiling of the floor, and took out his phone. He didn't have Esca's number, so it wasn't like he could call him and complain. What was it about Marcus that made everyone think he was so easy to take advantage of? First Lutorius ditched him, and now Esca.
If Marcus were an ass to people, than he could understand it. But he was trying here. And okay, sure, so maybe so far Marcus was acting more like a creeper than a friend, but he was trying.
He just wasn't very good at it. Maybe Esca had noticed him staring and decided he didn't want to deal with that. He'd have to work to keep his eyes to himself, even if his thoughts strayed to places they shouldn't. Places that involved him and Esca in the lab, and Marcus falling to his knees in front of him, Esca's fingers tearing at Marcus's scalp, his mouth dripping insults and encouragement at the same time --
“You're still here.”
Marcus damn near jumped out of his skin, whipping his head up to see Esca. He must've taken some classes in fucking ninja school to sneak up on him like that. “Yeah,” Marcus agreed. Esca was frowning down at him. “You told me to come, so I did.”
He tried hard not to flush at the innuendo that he was pretty sure was only in his head.
“I didn't expect you to wait for me.” Esca's frown faded into a carefully blank expression, and Marcus tried to think of something, anything, to say that wouldn't come off as making him sound more pathetic.
“I needed the help,” wasn't it. Damn.
I think my largest problem with this one was that a)I'm not great at science, so even with the science help from my flist, I still felt inadequate, and b)I have so much backstory for this 'verse in my head that it ended up creeping into the fic in all of the wrong places, making it less of a sexy continuation of the prompt meme response and more of it's own sprawling thing. If you're beginning to see a tendency of mine to make shit long and mindless and never ever finish it, well, you're not the only one.
And now, for the last part of 'annoyingly unfinished stories time, with Puck,' I'm going to share a piece that I just wrote a few nights ago. I keep a list of prompts that sound interesting in my journal, in case I ever get bored/need inspiration/whatevs. Well, I had just finished being triggered myself (I do in fact have PTSD, though it's not combat-based) and coming down from it, and this story just sorta fell out of that situation and from this prompt from the kink meme.
It's so new it doesn't even have a working title, other than the ever-descriptive, "PTSD Dreamtime With Esca." It's an AU, and as a fore-warning, I know next to nothing about actual wartime combat. Oops!
TW: Combat, minor character death, ptsd-style nightmares/flashbacks.
Bombs were going off, screams, shouts, explosions, and a chaos that was as familiar to Marcus as his own left hand, and as terrifying as the fact that it was currently covered in blood. Civilians were scattering - the ones that could move, at least - and Marcus found his training taking over. Move, keep cover, find the enemy, rescue civilians.
But he couldn't get his damned head to clear. Lutorius was down, and it didn't look like there was any way Marcus could get to him - not that it looked like he could help him even if he could reach him in time. As he looked to his left, he saw a dazed civvie girl, standing directly in the way of fire, her eyes locked on a dead and torn apart body. Family, probably.
Marcus was running towards her before he had time to think, returning fire, and dragging the girl with him behind an overturned Hummer. It was the only cover they had, at the moment.
He turned to the girl, no more than twelve, preparing to try to draw on his few known words of Arabic to try to calm her down, but the girl wasn't there anymore. Instead, Marcus saw a short blond man crouched behind the SUV with him. His eyes were cold, and he was wearing skinny jeans and a t-shirt that seemed to be untouched by the chaos around them. A chaos that seemed to slow to nearly a halt as soon as the blond had appeared.
"It's too late," the blond said. His English was only slightly accented, British maybe. But before Marcus could ask what he was talking about, or what the fuck was going on, the blond was gone and everything was flying back at normal speed.
The girl was back, shouting to Marcus in a tongue he couldn't quite understand. Marcus was screaming back at her. No! She was trying to run. To get to her family, and Marcus had to hold her back. He'd barely helped her dodge a stray bullet when the Hummer they were hiding behind blew apart into thousands of pieces.
---
Marcus awoke with a start, his breathing frantic, his body still wild and lunging to cover the girl that wasn't there. That hadn't been there for months on end.
His left leg burned where the shrapnel had torn deepest into him, but he sat up and took the pain all the same. It was different now, than it was then. It helped to ground him even as he nearly choked on the throbbing burn that tore through him.
Struggling against the memories, the nightmares, was difficult. He knew the pain was different, that it was dark, not bright like when he'd been in Iraq. He was even able to see his damned digital clock in the corner, flashing green letters, the rest of the world, his current world, his current reality slowly slipping back to him.
Memories. That's all the nightmares were. The past. And he was safe now, in the present, comfortably cared for in a room on his uncle's estate. He was safe.
And, if it weren't for the second appearance of the blond in his nightmares - someone who had never been there in reality, Marcus was damned-near positive - Marcus would almost be able to discount the nightmares and start to calm back down.
But no, his appearance stirred something in Marcus, and his eyes stayed wild and haunted far longer into the night than he could've dared hope for.
Of course, by the time I'd finished the above (what I'd dubbed "part one") and gone to type it up and post it, I'd seen that stellarsara had already done an awesome fill for it. So I shelved this one (the 'verse may or may not have included Death!Esca, though I'll never know if that's the direction it'll go, cause it's been shelved). It was probably going to be a self-indulgent and long and incomplete story, anywho.
Hell, all of my stories should come with a giant flashing neon sign saying that they're SIAF: Self-Indulgent As Fuck. And they should also come with a head's up that due to my depression, I can be distracted as easily as a goldfish, so I'm not great with endings. DX
I have shitloads of short story scenes that never intended to go anywhere, but just had to be written, but I figured if I added in those, (and the never-ending list of prompts that I came up with on my own,) well, this post would never get finished.
And I have some serious cleaning to do before I leave tomorrow on vacay, so I have to wrap this thing up.
Speaking of the vacay, gosh, am I anxious about it. I love my in-laws, and it sounds fun, but I'm not good on road trips at all. The end destination, a water park resort thingie, sounds like a blast, though, but a six hour car trip that starts at 5am? When I take sleeping pills that make zombies look like triathlon pros? This'll definitely be interesting, to say the least. Wish me luck!
But since I don't have any finished stories to share atm, I figured I'd just go ahead and show some pieces from my never-ending WiP/Abandoned fics folder. Just to show y'all that I still love you and our fandom, even if my work isn't being shared atm.
One of my main reasons for not posting my fics has to do with my anxiety issues. It's a disability thing, definitely. But one of the strongest anxieties among the many fears that pop up is that nobody would want to read them, because they're too ooc/weird/random. Because I'm well aware that most of my works could be considered idfic, which I know is largely hit-or-miss, and, well, since the fandom is so small, I'm terrified of being ousted as 'that weird one' or something, idek, my damned anxiety is irrational.
Anywho, I figured I'd post four pieces, with some intro/explanations about the 'verse and what happened to them/why I never posted, as a sign that I still love this fandom, even if I'm more of a phantom stalker than contributor, now-a-days.
The first snippet is from an AU based on this kink meme prompt that I started way back in September. I had a few vague ideas that ended up becoming full-fledged concepts that I couldn't stay away from.
I even discussed e-mail discussed the concept with Tif, who was being awesome with helping as a content beta for me at the time (even if I never did finish/post most of the stuff, lols, shame on me).
This is from very damn near to the beginning of the fic, which had the ever-original working title of 'Killing Machine!Esca.'
If there was one thing that Esca was sure of, it was this: he was being punished. Anything else, any reasons why or questions of circumstance, were completely and utterly irrelevent. He was being punished for not fighting hard enough, for letting his guard down, and for not properly and effectively defending his Master. It didn't matter that there were hundreds of them, and that Esca was only one. He was stronger than them, better.
Or, at least, he should have been.
When he hadn't managed to keep them at bay, or even to die fighting, like a proper soldier, Esca had failed. Failed, and earned a stay in his own dungeons, with the cracked ground beneath his back, the darkness all around him, a burning throb in his arm, and a frantic pounding in his head.
This one was originally going to be my Big Bang entry, but I ran into a shitload of problems with it. First I stalled at about 12k, unsure of which direction to take - the one that would make it longer and more epic (including more fantasy world-building and hordes of monsters, probs), but might also get too idfic-y and mean I wouldn't finish in time for the reveal, or the shorter more succinct one, which would mean I'd have to rework a bunch of shit (make it less plot-y and monster-y but more romance-y) but could definitely get it done in the right time.
As I was debating that, I started reading Eot9 for the first time, and realized a lot of the character slots that I'd filled up with original characters could be used by canon, but that they'd have to be reworked (along with the plot a bit, to reflect those changes). So I felt uncertain about presenting it as it was after all that - I know that OCs are frowned upon, esp. when canon characters are scarce.
Then my comp crashed, and I was only able to find ~10.5k of what I'd had before, so I just sort of gave up. *shrugs* As things stand, I'd love to go back to it someday, but I'm just not sure if the interest is there, or if it would be way more idfic-y and deviate too much from what the original prompter wanted.
Now the second piece I'm going to provide a snippet of was actually my NaNoWriMo 2011 piece. It was, unfortunately, unfinished (even though it technically 'won' NaNo). I know what I want to happen for most of the ending (esp. the whodunnit), but once I hit 50k-ish, well, the words just didn't want to come anymore. Total writing burnout.
This one was also based off of a kink meme request, and is another that I doubt I'd post due to the level of idfic-ness and the complete left-turn it took from what the original requester seemed to want. Also, well, I'm not great at editing and it would need a lot of it to be postable.
It has the pleasant working title of "Eyes Like A Loaded Gun," and this particular section comes from early on in Chapter Two. TW: Gore. NSFW.
Marcus most certainly didn't let out an undignified yelp, or leap backwards until he nearly knocked over his tools. Nope, no way. And if the digital recorder says otherwise, well, that thing was a piece of shit, anyways, and Marcus always knew they shouldn't have gotten it. Who needed to hear him when he was sleepy and tired and grumpy, anyways?
For a brief second it was like the dead guy - not dead guy, fuck, this guy was alive - didn't even notice that he was sitting upright. He just stared off, blinking, for several long seconds, before reaching up to touch himself, his bullet holes, and the cut in his forehead. Marcus was pretty sure he winced alongside the not-so-dead-guy with each brush of his fingertips.
“Uhm," Marcus said, which was about as smooth as he was aiming for, since he was pretty sure that it came out as an awkward squawking grunt, instead of anything dignified. He was also pretty sure that he was still sprawled against his metal instruments.
The living guy - and how the fuck was he alive, Marcus had checked himself, and sure, the pulse might've been so weak that maybe Lutorius AND Uncle AND Marcus had managed to miss it, maybe, if this were a fucking movie, that was. And maybe he'd just been unconscious the whole time, like in a really heavy coma or some sort of bullshit.
But nobody took that many shots to the chest, or had that deep and bloody of a head wound and lived to tell about it.
Nobody.
Except that obviously this guy did. And he now turned towards Marcus, pinning him with his eyes, which were slowly unclouding to become an intense and deep shade of blue.
In the remainder of the 'verse there's honest-to-god soul-bonding, Fae, goblin-builders, past sexings with certain Seal Princes, Fae royalty that includes a ball suspiciously reminiscent of the ball scene in The Labyrinth if it weren't for all of the gossiping and snide Fae around, shapeshifters, and some more death, slight gore, and confusion. *shrugs* See what I mean about id-fic? But what can I say? Nano always seems to bring out my deep down writing desires.
This next one is a continuation from a stripper!Esca AU meme response that I wrote for SunServ ages ago. The original piece I wrote was titled, "You're hotter than a bunsen burner set to full power", and this piece takes place the very next day.
My file title for it is honestly, "Stripper fic v2," so, well, at least you know to be expecting the NSFW snippet ahead.
Marcus shifted, his butt sore from the hard tiling of the floor, and took out his phone. He didn't have Esca's number, so it wasn't like he could call him and complain. What was it about Marcus that made everyone think he was so easy to take advantage of? First Lutorius ditched him, and now Esca.
If Marcus were an ass to people, than he could understand it. But he was trying here. And okay, sure, so maybe so far Marcus was acting more like a creeper than a friend, but he was trying.
He just wasn't very good at it. Maybe Esca had noticed him staring and decided he didn't want to deal with that. He'd have to work to keep his eyes to himself, even if his thoughts strayed to places they shouldn't. Places that involved him and Esca in the lab, and Marcus falling to his knees in front of him, Esca's fingers tearing at Marcus's scalp, his mouth dripping insults and encouragement at the same time --
“You're still here.”
Marcus damn near jumped out of his skin, whipping his head up to see Esca. He must've taken some classes in fucking ninja school to sneak up on him like that. “Yeah,” Marcus agreed. Esca was frowning down at him. “You told me to come, so I did.”
He tried hard not to flush at the innuendo that he was pretty sure was only in his head.
“I didn't expect you to wait for me.” Esca's frown faded into a carefully blank expression, and Marcus tried to think of something, anything, to say that wouldn't come off as making him sound more pathetic.
“I needed the help,” wasn't it. Damn.
I think my largest problem with this one was that a)I'm not great at science, so even with the science help from my flist, I still felt inadequate, and b)I have so much backstory for this 'verse in my head that it ended up creeping into the fic in all of the wrong places, making it less of a sexy continuation of the prompt meme response and more of it's own sprawling thing. If you're beginning to see a tendency of mine to make shit long and mindless and never ever finish it, well, you're not the only one.
And now, for the last part of 'annoyingly unfinished stories time, with Puck,' I'm going to share a piece that I just wrote a few nights ago. I keep a list of prompts that sound interesting in my journal, in case I ever get bored/need inspiration/whatevs. Well, I had just finished being triggered myself (I do in fact have PTSD, though it's not combat-based) and coming down from it, and this story just sorta fell out of that situation and from this prompt from the kink meme.
It's so new it doesn't even have a working title, other than the ever-descriptive, "PTSD Dreamtime With Esca." It's an AU, and as a fore-warning, I know next to nothing about actual wartime combat. Oops!
TW: Combat, minor character death, ptsd-style nightmares/flashbacks.
Bombs were going off, screams, shouts, explosions, and a chaos that was as familiar to Marcus as his own left hand, and as terrifying as the fact that it was currently covered in blood. Civilians were scattering - the ones that could move, at least - and Marcus found his training taking over. Move, keep cover, find the enemy, rescue civilians.
But he couldn't get his damned head to clear. Lutorius was down, and it didn't look like there was any way Marcus could get to him - not that it looked like he could help him even if he could reach him in time. As he looked to his left, he saw a dazed civvie girl, standing directly in the way of fire, her eyes locked on a dead and torn apart body. Family, probably.
Marcus was running towards her before he had time to think, returning fire, and dragging the girl with him behind an overturned Hummer. It was the only cover they had, at the moment.
He turned to the girl, no more than twelve, preparing to try to draw on his few known words of Arabic to try to calm her down, but the girl wasn't there anymore. Instead, Marcus saw a short blond man crouched behind the SUV with him. His eyes were cold, and he was wearing skinny jeans and a t-shirt that seemed to be untouched by the chaos around them. A chaos that seemed to slow to nearly a halt as soon as the blond had appeared.
"It's too late," the blond said. His English was only slightly accented, British maybe. But before Marcus could ask what he was talking about, or what the fuck was going on, the blond was gone and everything was flying back at normal speed.
The girl was back, shouting to Marcus in a tongue he couldn't quite understand. Marcus was screaming back at her. No! She was trying to run. To get to her family, and Marcus had to hold her back. He'd barely helped her dodge a stray bullet when the Hummer they were hiding behind blew apart into thousands of pieces.
---
Marcus awoke with a start, his breathing frantic, his body still wild and lunging to cover the girl that wasn't there. That hadn't been there for months on end.
His left leg burned where the shrapnel had torn deepest into him, but he sat up and took the pain all the same. It was different now, than it was then. It helped to ground him even as he nearly choked on the throbbing burn that tore through him.
Struggling against the memories, the nightmares, was difficult. He knew the pain was different, that it was dark, not bright like when he'd been in Iraq. He was even able to see his damned digital clock in the corner, flashing green letters, the rest of the world, his current world, his current reality slowly slipping back to him.
Memories. That's all the nightmares were. The past. And he was safe now, in the present, comfortably cared for in a room on his uncle's estate. He was safe.
And, if it weren't for the second appearance of the blond in his nightmares - someone who had never been there in reality, Marcus was damned-near positive - Marcus would almost be able to discount the nightmares and start to calm back down.
But no, his appearance stirred something in Marcus, and his eyes stayed wild and haunted far longer into the night than he could've dared hope for.
Of course, by the time I'd finished the above (what I'd dubbed "part one") and gone to type it up and post it, I'd seen that stellarsara had already done an awesome fill for it. So I shelved this one (the 'verse may or may not have included Death!Esca, though I'll never know if that's the direction it'll go, cause it's been shelved). It was probably going to be a self-indulgent and long and incomplete story, anywho.
Hell, all of my stories should come with a giant flashing neon sign saying that they're SIAF: Self-Indulgent As Fuck. And they should also come with a head's up that due to my depression, I can be distracted as easily as a goldfish, so I'm not great with endings. DX
I have shitloads of short story scenes that never intended to go anywhere, but just had to be written, but I figured if I added in those, (and the never-ending list of prompts that I came up with on my own,) well, this post would never get finished.
And I have some serious cleaning to do before I leave tomorrow on vacay, so I have to wrap this thing up.
Speaking of the vacay, gosh, am I anxious about it. I love my in-laws, and it sounds fun, but I'm not good on road trips at all. The end destination, a water park resort thingie, sounds like a blast, though, but a six hour car trip that starts at 5am? When I take sleeping pills that make zombies look like triathlon pros? This'll definitely be interesting, to say the least. Wish me luck!