you know, this icon just needs more love
When I was very young I was in a gymnastics class, and I was good at it. I am flexible and always have been, and so I've always preferred any kind of activity that involves being bendy but doesn't really require me to run around a lot. (Yoga is good.) My only nemesis at the studio I went to was the balance beam -- not that I have poor balance, because as long as I was on the practice beam that's only a few inches off the floor, I was totally good. But that goddamned high beam -- it killed me. I only have two phobias, public speaking and heights; as for public speaking, dozens of speeches and presentations in various classes have trained me to the point where I can speak quite calmly and suffer no more than slightly shaky hands for half an hour afterwards. But the one and only time I had to walk across that high beam, spin and return -- it was hell. I froze up and cried like the freaking baby I was, all snot and red-faced, wanting off that damn thing so bad I would willingly have ripped off my skin to get back on solid ground. It wasn't rational, it wasn't tameable, it wasn't sane. I put a lot of stock in being control of myself at all times, being in my right mind -- I have plenty of family history to justify being paranoid about my mental stability -- and being in any way disconnected from the ground like that, all vertigo and nausea and senseless screaming in my head with no breath to give it voice, that is real fear. Maybe the only real fear I've ever known. I've known unhappiness and worry, but crushing terror? That's it.
I crossed that fucking high beam. One toe at a time, practically wetting myself, but I crossed that fucking high beam and turned at the end and went right back. I don't think I could stand up for a while afterwards. I think that that is the single most courageous thing I've ever done, and the memory of how I felt after I got off that beam is what has gotten me through every single hard thing I've done since then. If I don't want to do something and I've got a legitimate reason not to do it other than fear, then I won't do it. But if the only thing between me and some goal is fear, I know to get on that damn high beam and walk across it all over again, because it isn't going to kill me.
Today was the closest I've ever felt to really believing that it would kill me, though. I'm in a stage crafts class and we did rigging today -- climbing around in the catwalks, learning the fly system. I spent weeks preparing myself mentally for the high catwalks (they're probably 30 feet off the ground at a guess), but I had never considered how we were supposed to get up there -- I had figured there would be stairs. No. It's a vertical fucking ladder. Pretty much my worst heights-related nightmare; nothing to support me but some narrow strips of metal and my own arm strength, which, trust me, I would not have faith in for more than 20 or so feet. I told my teacher, Dave, that I had a problem with heights but that I'd try; I did, and got halfway up before I had to come back down. That alone was a thousand times worse than the high beam. Nausea, full-body shakes, cold sweat. Dave said I could try again if I wanted but that I could hear his lecture from the floor all right if I couldn't do it.
I wanted to keep my feet on the ground so bad it hurt, real and physical, all the way down to my fingernails. But I stood there shaking and remembered that. Fucking. High beam. And I can be a stubborn bitch when I want to be.
I have never felt like I did after I got up that ladder. I'm just amazed that I remember any of Dave's lecture after that, because I could barely stand. I don't like complaining, I won't complain of anything short of a broken bone -- and consider the fact that the only time I ever did break a bone, it literally took me a month to admit that maybe it was something worse than a sprain. But all of Stage Crafts got to see me cry today, damn it. Just convincing myself not to puke, not to pass out, took up nearly all of my mental capacity. It felt like my eyes were going to pop right out of my head and by breastbone was going to crack from the titanium-plated lock-down tension in my chest. And then don't even talk to me about having to get back on that ladder, stepping off the platform into nothingness until my foot touched a rung, to climb down again.
But. But. After all of that, after the two hours it took for the pressure to finally ease the rest of the way off my chest, after the hesitant dinner while I was still feeling sick, after I had to call home to purge my hysteria? I realized that High Beam 2.0 went fucking down. And it was glorious. If I had taken the easy way out and stayed on the ground, I would still be miserable with myself right now for letting my classmates see me break down and give up. But because I did it, no matter how much it felt like I was having a heart attack at the time, I'm feeling really damn good about life right now. And though I would love to never look at that ladder again, I know that I'll have to go up in the catwalks again for my rigging test -- and there's a small part of me that actually wants to give that thing the finger and climb it again, just for the hell of it.
And seriously, Dave and everyone in that class? Best. Support group. Ever. No one pushed me, no one mocked me, no one didn't take me seriously. Everyone offered help without trying to do anything for me, and they cheered both when I made it up on the second try and then when I made it back down in one piece. Dude. All of you rock so, so hard.
So there's my touchy-feely life lesson for the month. :)
With that out of the way, it's meme time. I'm doing NaNo again this year -- won't get into my personal conflicts about that just now, maybe in another post -- but it's made me want to do some writing memes again to get warmed up. I'll probably do some request memes later, but for right now I'm redoing one I did a couple of years ago for the sake of getting all my ideas out there and organized again.
Take any currently unfinished fics you have and write the first line/paragraph from each.
Carbon Footprint (Torchwood)
-Wow, I just reread what I had written of this and I honestly don't know why I haven't posted it yet. Will do that tomorrow, I think. But for now, a teaser...
“What do you think?” Tosh asked, anxious.
Ianto pursed his lips and blew out slowly. “It’ll be risky.”
“If you had to do a threat assessment, though.”
“To us or them?” Ianto raised an eyebrow for emphasis.
Tosh reconsidered her question, nibbling lightly on her bottom lip. “Benefits, then,” she said. “Do they outweigh the consequences?”
“Altruistically speaking, yes,” said Ianto morosely.
“Oh, come on,” said Tosh, brightening up suddenly and, in Ianto’s opinion, completely without warrant. This had been her idea in the first place; she didn’t realize what it was going to cost Ianto personally, and he wasn’t about to tell her. “It won’t be so bad,” she plowed on. “I’m sure Gwen will back us up, and then it’ll be majority rule!”
“In Jackworld, Jack’s vote counts infinity,” Ianto pointed out.
Tosh did the unthinkable, and pouted.
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Sitting With the Dead (Torchwood)
-I had this insane plan of doing a reverse-order series of thirty ficlets exploring various times when any member of the team had to deal with a dead body in some way or another, and I actually made it through about ten segments... and on re-reading, they're all really good. A couple of example opening lines:
"Zero. The Beginning."
It was Rhys who woke Jack the morning after the end of the world.
*****
"Twenty-Eight. Fragile Things."
Gwen took Jack and left Rhys alone with Tosh, or at least the sliver of Tosh that he could still see underneath the pillar that was threatening to crush her. Rhys didn’t mind seeing the back of Gwen’s boss -- he was still trying not to think about the very, very dead man he’d seen wake up and start walking and talking like nothing had happened. Gwen didn’t seem bothered by it, so Rhys decided he wouldn’t be either. He could pick his battles when it came to Gwen and Torchwood.
But he hated Gwen leaving. He heard a door slam somewhere else in the building and suddenly he could feel the silence like a living thing, watching him. Waiting for him to do something.
A woman was dying right next to him, and he couldn’t do anything about it.
*****
"Twenty-Six. Three Quarts."
Tosh held Owen’s hand in the back of the SUV and didn’t cry. Gwen wasn’t crying. If Ianto’s face was covered with anything other than sweat and blood, no one would know because he’d kept it turned away, turned down, since... and now he was driving, barely weaving at all. Tosh couldn’t look at him or Gwen, not now. Her eyes had found their resting place and there her gaze lay, too tired to move.
*****
"Eighteen. 1941 Redux."
Thousands of kilometers above the Earth, there is a man poking absently at a console in his spaceship, scanning for a potential identity. The easiest will be to choose from the pool of the recent war dead. War makes his job so easy. He’s looking forward to the game with the same old giggling warmth in his gut.
He picks the name Jack Harkness. It has a ring to it that he likes...
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Cry Havoc (Fullmetal Alchemist)
-Decent, but needs a serious rewrite... part of that series of Greed stories I started once upon a time.
Only a few weeks since their escape and Greed had already set up a place, a basement club he fondly dubbed the Devil’s Nest, with apartment space above and (Dorochet suspected) a little sub-basement space below, which no one but Greed entered. Their rescuer was not human, the chimeras knew that much without being told; but they didn’t question their boss, and he didn’t question them.
He liked them. It was obvious. He tsked when they got hurt, listened with real interest to their stories, fixed them up with any possessions they could want -- maybe he was just playing with his new toys, but at least they were well-loved toys. Dorochet had met self-serving people before, but it seemed like the human variety were far more capable of cruelty. Greed... he actually cared.
It was strange coming from someone with such alien eyes.
“Hey. Dorochet.”
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Year to Year (Last Exile)
-An attempt at first-person from Dio. Not so sure about it.
I remember once, when I was very young, a trick my sister played on me. She came to my playroom late in the evening and asked me how I would like it if Father never came home. I was disbelieving, and asked her how she could say such a thing. What if he is dead? she asked me. What if I were dead? She knelt beside me and spoke with such grave intent that I became terrified that what she was asking had already come true; I wept and wept and would not be consoled until I saw my father again and touched his hand to make sure it was real. His hand when he stood barely touched the top of my shoulder. I loved my father.
That was the first of my birthweeks that I can remember. Delphine always gave me gifts I couldn’t forget.
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untitled post-Western Air Temple (Avatar)
-Fiddling around with the character of Zuko after the events of The Western Air Temple... never likely to finish this one, it's pretty plotless, but some of the passages might be gankable for other stories.
Dim light of early morning suffused the hanging vines of the Western Air Temple with a gray softness, and the dreamlike feeling of a world at peace. If there was any time appropriate for reflection and meditation, now was it.
Of course, Zuko had thought the same thing about the middle of the night, when everything was dark and no one could see him. And after failure and a brief, fitful sleep, he’d hoped the same about the pitch black of pre-dawn. No such luck. He’d been through so much, his mind had warped and changed in such drastic ways over the past months... and now that he was here, where he finally felt like he was doing something worth the cost of the air he taxed the world to breathe, he was stuck. So. Damn. Stuck.
On the Avatar.
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untitled Zuko AU (Avatar)
-Of the two Avatar fic-bits I have on my computer, this one is far superior. If I had any clue where it was going as far as plot, I'd keep working on it. Unfortunately it just turned into an extension of the series, but in a very different direction... and I don't know if I'm willing to spend the time and mental effort it would take to bring this to its logical conclusion. Which would be long. And epic. And I'm already writing a long epic, so. The following is the exact moment in Western Air Temple where my AU splits from canon. You can see where this is going...
“If you won’t accept me as a friend, maybe you’ll take me as a prisoner.”
Kneeling, Zuko raised his hands palms-up, wrists together. He closed his eyes, knowing that this was as low as desperation got. If they refused this... well, he didn’t know what he’d have to do.
“No. We. Won’t!” Katara shouted, lashing out with a broad stream of water that hit him like a brick wall, knocking him backwards.
“Katara, wait,” said the other Water Tribe boy, her brother. Zuko rolled over and sat up, spitting out a mouthful of water. He sat still and wary while Sokka talked. His tone was more one of distasteful necessity than calm reason. “I don’t like the idea of him being here, either, but wouldn’t it be better to keep him where we can see him?”
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Last One to Die Please Turn Out the Lights (Death Note)
-Mello/Near angst or... something. Again, the plot is too nebulous to really continue.
God died when Mello was fourteen. There was no fanfare, no warning. One moment there were choices, and the next -- the choices weren’t gone, but they would never be made. Could never be made.
Why didn’t he make the choice before he went? It was the only choice that had ever mattered. It was the only choice that would ever have been easy. After all, Mello knew -- Mello had always known that it wouldn’t be himself. But --
Why didn’t he make the choice? A countdown arrested in limbo, forever frozen at T minus five, four, three, two -- two -- two -- two --
Two left. Two unequals; too unequal; this was a Hobson’s choice, not meant to be answered, because the answer was no answer at all. Roger had told them that it was too hard for the previous L to make the choice because Mello and Near were both so close to the best. Because they were both his favorites.
Lies. Lies lies lies lies lies lies lies
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The Ragged Edge (original)
-Abandoned NaNoWriMo novel idea from 2005, set in some vaguely cyberpunk future version of Memphis... The characters didn't really speak to me, and I didn't have a plot in mind.
They said you could never go home again. Jesse didn’t believe that.
Because when he stepped to the door of the bus, there was the brick wall across from him, slathered in torn posters and a dried film of old glue; and there was the highrise peeking over the skyline in his peripheral sight that everyone knew was haunted from the sixth floor up; and there were the familiar smells of piss and rotting garbage funneled over from the alley nearby by a fluke combination of the placement of buildings and the air currents of ventilation systems. And there was Thad on the streetcorner, waving like a lunatic, impervious to the smell, coated and gloved in the unusual deep winter low of sixty- six degrees Fahrenheit. Jesse wondered if it was physically possible for Thad to get too hot. He never even turned the cold tap on in the shower, and he’d been known to complain about the winter chill to people wearing tank tops and shorts.
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untitled dragon-world (original)
-NaNo novel idea for 2007... I ended up going with Theseus' Paradox for my 50K instead, but this was an idea I came up with with a couple of my friends who wanted to appear in a story of mine. It was this whole Dinotopia-esque island world populated by various species of dragons rather than dinosaurs, and the human characters all lived in different terrains and were friends with the dragons associated with that terrain. Like Thyes, the character in the following piece, lived in a seaside colony and so knew the coastal water dragons. Etc.
Night was falling and the tide was coming in. Sunset tore the surface of the water open like a thin skin and the fire underneath licked further up the shore with each breaking wave, trickling like blood into tidepools to feed the little creatures that crawled and flexed boneless tendrils against the saturated sand. Light flared against and through the ghost crabs that scurried away to the lees of stones further up the shore.
Ghosts on fire. Immolation of the soul. Thyes could almost see the ashes in the wind. Her throat was dry, as it had been all day, but she’d stopped noticing after the ceremony. That had been... what? An hour ago? Forever and not nearly long enough.
Anything, anything to be further from this moment.
Thyes blinked slowly against the setting sun and looked up, but couldn’t stand the brightness for long. Her eyes returned to the shadows building in the water. Night always seemed to her to rise from beneath, rather than settling across the world like a shroud from the sky.
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untitled Ahkekhu & Mfaume (original)
-I like dragons. I like deserts. Not enough SFF is set in Africa or uses the more obscure elements of Egyptian mythology. I still like this story idea and want to make it go somewhere eventually...
A pair of children, siblings from the look of them, were playing with a sand lizard. They had caught it scurrying up a stone wall, and now the little boy tugged the lizard’s tail while the little girl peered into its eyes as if divining its tiny animal soul. Watching from his place by the door to the waybuilding, Mfaume placed fruitless bets against himself as to whether or not they would kill the creature out of misguided curiosity, or let it free to savor the chase again. He could not guess one way or the other. Children were indecipherable that way.
Footsteps that crunched lightly on the sand brought an older woman to Mfaume’s side, holding a stoneware cup. She inclined her head vaguely and held the cup out. He bowed low and accepted it. Water -- not cool, but water.
She said something in the language of this place, and he passed a hand over his left ear to show he didn’t understand. The caravan’s hired interpreter was away in the village proper. The grandmother shook her head, nudged the cup in his hands, and turned away.
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And On the Surface, Die (Pirates of the Caribbean)
-Missing-scene sort of fic set between 2nd & 3rd movies -- the first meetings between the Dutchman's crew and the East India Company lot, mostly, because that particular clash of villains really interested me but wasn't shown much on screen.
Murmurs rippled through the gathered men, ropes and rags hanging forgotten from their hands or whatever passed for their hands. A stone had been thrown into the calm pool of their resignation, and the disturbance was greater than any of them could have imagined.
“What’s going on here? Break this up!” Maccus pushed Two-Head and Koleniko aside, but when he caught sight of what had the others captivated, he too couldn’t help but stop, uncomprehending.
Davy Jones, terror of the deep, lay curled on the deck before the helm, unmoving,, eyes open, his inhuman face a contortion of agony. The small, quick curling and writhing of the elongated fingers of his right hand betrayed his frenzied attempts to breathe, to move, but something held him still as death -- some force that caused the men, not yet robbed of their superstition despite their curse, to mutter oaths and draw silent warding signs in the air.
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Orpheus Descending (Supernatural)
-That sequel to Orpheus At the Gates I threatened to write... probably to be followed by a third piece, Orpheus Ascending, to get the whole allegory out of the way. Oh, Sammich. Sucks to be you.
Sam said the last word of the incantation and his tongue burst into weltering boils; his eyes caught fire and his skin sang taut hot and dry, threatening to crack in the updraft from Hell, literally; the air sizzled, little particles of dry earthy matter swept up by the wind off the dead ground of the cemetery all caught fire so that the air was burning, alive and dancing and lights streaking around in Sam’s head and through his nose and mouth until he felt like exploding or collapsing into nothing, fire through and through.
and it hurt, it hurt so much he wanted to rip his skin off to get out of it, he wanted to tear his face away, God --
Not God, definitely not God, no.
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Earth to Earth (Trigun)
-Isn't this just a blast to the past. No point in posting the opening paragraph, so here's the opening dialogue of chapter 16, "Twice Shy," the unposted, unfinished chapter that this story's been dangling on for years now. *grimace*
“Where did we come from?”
“I don’t know.”
“Vash, you sai--”
“I don’t know, Knives. That’s the truth.”
“But we came here on the ships.”
“How do you know --?”
“I just do. Did we?”
“Yes.”
“How old are we?”
“... Knives...”
“How old?”
“Over a century. A hundred thirty-something, maybe forty.”
“You don’t know?”
“The years run together, they... look, Knives --”
“We’re not human.”
It wasn’t a question. Vash met Knives’ gaze, its alien paleness accentuated by the shadows cast by his bangs and by the high sloping dune that rose above them. The noon hours were murder on Knives’ unweathered skin, even with sunblock, and besides -- they needed the stillness. To talk.
Vash had not thought that much could seem surreal to him anymore, not after the life he’d lived. But talking civilly to Knives, knowing that his brother had regained some memory but not knowing its extent or effect, plowing through huge hard facts like species and age while dancing around the more ambigious areas of cause and effect, emotion and reaction -- that was bizarre.
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Ostiatim (Abhorsen trilogy/Harry Potter crossover)
-Yeah... the other side of the curtain totally led to a rip in the fabric of Sabriel's nine-leveled Death realm. Absolute wish-fulfillment fic in which Sirius is alive and gallvanting around the Old Kingdom. Not actually all that bad, in retrospect.
The blue and silver Paperwing of the Abhorsen spun downwards out of a cloudbank, the stormy weather disagreeing with its already thoroughly damp pilot. Her black hair hung in strings and tangles in her face, her useless helmet lying behind her in the cockpit. One grimy hand struggled with the slippery strap of a small leather pouch attached to the bandolier that hung across her chest.
Sabriel had given over most of the control of the Dead to her younger half-sister and fellow Abhorsen, Lirael -- but every now and again duty would call while Lirael was gone, and Sabriel would take flight in her beloved paper aircraft, leaving her husband and daughter to take care of the Old Kingdom’s politics. To be honest, Sabriel was torn between her love for her family and her hatred of bureaucrats, ignorant deep-Southern Ancelstierrans, and politics in general.
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Of Human Bondage (Harry Potter)
-Challenge-based ficlet that turned epic on me -- Remus is forced to go through with the Ministry's new dumb-fuck Werewolf Registration Act, which requires him to have an owner. The owner is Snape. Wackiness ensues. (Okay, mopey, serious, Nazi-allegory angst ensues, but you know. Whatever.)
Registration had been set up in an abandoned Muggle warehouse in the bad end of a poor London suburb, guarded by stern-faced wizards and hidden from prying eyes by hastily thrown up Misdirection Charms. The air in the warehouse was close and cloying, and the whole room felt cold despite being crowded with people. Everything smelled of stale cigarette smoke and bad cologne all overlaid with the sickly-sweet scent of rotting vegetation drifting in from the only open window, which opened onto an alley with several dumpsters in it.
Desks were arrayed all along one gray wall with lines of quietly chattering people approaching them one by one. Children looked up at parents with curious faces and asked for the hundredth time what was happening; parents choked with fear pushed their babies ahead of them in line to be registered; men and women alike stood silent and still, sick with the wrongness of it; total strangers comforted each other with small hugs and gifts of tissues and shoulders to lean on.
Remus was finding it difficult to breathe between the press of people and the smell of damp, week-old cabbages. By the time he finally reached one of the desks, he found that he could hardly think -- not least because he didn’t want to think.
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Quod Sumus, Hoc Ecitis (Harry Potter)
-"Such as we are, you shall be." A mashup of Remus in his final moments, fighting Greyback at the big battle of Hogwarts, and various flashbacks -- to Sirius being alive, to meeting the newly-bitten werewolf in the Serious Bites ward at St. Mungo's, to other little in-between pieces. Sort of a missing-scene/life-flashing-before-his-eyes hybrid. I like it a lot, but I need to figure out what else to work in to fill it out properly and pull it all together into a poetic ending. I love abstract, character stuff like this.
The middle of a firefight -- Remus had been here before, amidst the screams and the dizzying confusion of bolts of light, tripping over inert forms and misfired spells and slamming into Shield Charms everywhere, slipping on blood -- losing blood -- hurt, lost, unable to breathe or to do anything, anything else except keep fighting, keep living. He’d been here before, and somehow it was easier to keep his head this time, although the reality of the fight was no easier to accept.
He’d been here before, but the children hadn’t.
“MOVE!” he bellowed to a blond boy he didn’t recognize but who wore the yellow-trimmed robes of a Hufflepuff. He was sporting a nasty black eye and holding his left wrist in a white-knuckled grip; its angle was very wrong. Remus caught a glimpse of his wide eyes and set jaw before he fell -- on purpose, though for the space of a mad heartbeat Remus thought he’d been hit -- and rolled out of the way. Just in time. The Death Eater behind him who had been taking aim let off a shot at Remus instead, who blocked it and dodged fast, running at the other man and tackling him for all he was worth.
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Theseus' Paradox (Torchwood/Doctor Who/Supernatural crossover)
I'm not touching this one with a ten-foot pole as far as attempting to summarize it or pick a single passage. I just broke 90,000 wordcount on this sucker last week and there are only six chapters left to write, if all goes according to plan. God knows if it will. But... whatever. I think I need to start posting this now or I'm going to lose all my nerve and never do it at all. Big fat chicken. *smacks self*
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And the massive meme finally comes to a close! Time for sleep, to recover from the day of trauma.
still a little bouncy with pride,
-rave