A fic snippet that isn't technically from a WIP.
Writer-types, do you ever get those moments when your brain hands you a piece of headcanon that you immediately love but know you'll probably never be able to use effectively?
I've got a bunch. My current favorite popped into my head back in January, and I wrote the gist of it down, but there's not enough there to make a story and I feel like it's too specific and incongruous to simply tuck into a longer piece.
It's not impossible that I'll use the notion (or even this page or so that I already have written) at some point, but it seems unlikely enough that I'm just gonna toss it out there and call it a renewed attempt at posting WIP bits on the weekend (which didn't happen at all last month because it was May and everything was ridiculous).
Here's a canonical thing about Shaun Mason: he's the kind of person who always needs to keep his hands busy with something. Just off the top of my head, over the course of Feed Georgia comments on it when he a) idly tries to pick some very high-quality locks, just because, b) tries to disassemble part of his seat on an airplane because he's bored, and c) makes chain mail.
According to my sudden and fully-developed headcanon, the logical extension of this is that he knows how to knit. (I think this also owes a lot to a conversation I read else-net a while ago about the probability that Steve Rogers knows how to knit.)
So here, have a completely unedited bit of writing about it! Newsflesh fic fragment, no series spoilers, no warnings, Georgia POV.
Being on long drives makes Shaun fidgety.
If they gave out prizes for understatement, I'd be walking away with a trophy for that one. Shaun gets so fidgety on long drives that sometimes we spend the extra money on gas and take both the van and my bike so he can drive. The expense can be better than the alternatives, which are me driving the van and Shaun fidgeting or him driving the van and me getting bitchy because his driving stresses me out.
It's not so bad at night. He has dead-standard night vision, which lets him zone out easily in the dark, so he stares out the window and half dozes until we get where we're going. He also knows I'm a better driver than he is at night, whereas during the day, he can consciously tell his competitive streak to settle down all he likes, but there's still that grumbly feeling that he can damn well drive as well as I can. And he can--in terms of skill, he's a perfectly good driver. It's just that he uses that skill to stay alive while driving like a maniac, and I don't choose to share the experience.
When we're in that situation during daylight hours, the best option is making sure he has something to keep his hands busy. We'd been on the road for an hour when I finally got tired of watching him twitch out of the corner of my eye. "Did you bring your knitting?" I asked.
I caught his smirk in the rearview mirror. "Yeah."
"So go get it and settle down."
He ducked back into the van and came back with a bag that clanked when he dropped it between our seats. Out came the half-made chain mail shirt, then the pliers, and finally the smaller bag full of links waiting to be attached. Most Irwins are as insufferable as Shaun is when there's nothing to do, and chain mail seems to be a nearly-universal method of staying busy.
The funny thing is, he does know how to knit. I called his chain mail habit "knitting" one time too many when we were seventeen, and the next thing I knew he'd ordered needles and yarn online and taught himself from watching a few videos. He didn't stick with it long enough to learn to do anything fancy, but he got the basics down in just an hour or so, spent enough weeks working at it here and there to get comfortable with it, and then stopped once he was satisfied.
That experiment had two outcomes. The main one is that he now sometimes walks up to anyone he sees knitting in public and makes passably educated comments about their work. You haven't lived until you've seen a teenage boy in full body armor, armed to the teeth, wander up to a middle-aged woman and start discussing sock yarn--not that knitting is the province of middle-aged women, exactly, but he doesn't tend to approach women our age about much of anything, and not many men have the habit. Middle-aged women, on the other hand, often have the sense to feel safer with Shaun around, so if he feels like sitting there and admiring their lace work, they're usually happy to have him.
I heard a guy crack a joke about men knitting in Shaun's hearing once. Shaun, not so much out of passion for the topic as for the delight of taking someone down a peg, spent the next fifteen minutes explaining that men used to knit all the time until sometime in the twentieth century, and it was manly as hell and a valuable contribution to the war effort, fuck you very much.
The other lasting result of his brief foray into actually knitting rather than offering commentary on the subject is a scarf he made me. The scarf doesn't see nearly as much action as the chain mail he's put together for me, but I intend to keep that thing until I die, dropped stitches and all.
Originally posted at http://umadoshi.dreamwidth.org/437675.html. Comment here if you like, or comment there using OpenID. Comments at DW:
I've got a bunch. My current favorite popped into my head back in January, and I wrote the gist of it down, but there's not enough there to make a story and I feel like it's too specific and incongruous to simply tuck into a longer piece.
It's not impossible that I'll use the notion (or even this page or so that I already have written) at some point, but it seems unlikely enough that I'm just gonna toss it out there and call it a renewed attempt at posting WIP bits on the weekend (which didn't happen at all last month because it was May and everything was ridiculous).
Here's a canonical thing about Shaun Mason: he's the kind of person who always needs to keep his hands busy with something. Just off the top of my head, over the course of Feed Georgia comments on it when he a) idly tries to pick some very high-quality locks, just because, b) tries to disassemble part of his seat on an airplane because he's bored, and c) makes chain mail.
According to my sudden and fully-developed headcanon, the logical extension of this is that he knows how to knit. (I think this also owes a lot to a conversation I read else-net a while ago about the probability that Steve Rogers knows how to knit.)
So here, have a completely unedited bit of writing about it! Newsflesh fic fragment, no series spoilers, no warnings, Georgia POV.
Being on long drives makes Shaun fidgety.
If they gave out prizes for understatement, I'd be walking away with a trophy for that one. Shaun gets so fidgety on long drives that sometimes we spend the extra money on gas and take both the van and my bike so he can drive. The expense can be better than the alternatives, which are me driving the van and Shaun fidgeting or him driving the van and me getting bitchy because his driving stresses me out.
It's not so bad at night. He has dead-standard night vision, which lets him zone out easily in the dark, so he stares out the window and half dozes until we get where we're going. He also knows I'm a better driver than he is at night, whereas during the day, he can consciously tell his competitive streak to settle down all he likes, but there's still that grumbly feeling that he can damn well drive as well as I can. And he can--in terms of skill, he's a perfectly good driver. It's just that he uses that skill to stay alive while driving like a maniac, and I don't choose to share the experience.
When we're in that situation during daylight hours, the best option is making sure he has something to keep his hands busy. We'd been on the road for an hour when I finally got tired of watching him twitch out of the corner of my eye. "Did you bring your knitting?" I asked.
I caught his smirk in the rearview mirror. "Yeah."
"So go get it and settle down."
He ducked back into the van and came back with a bag that clanked when he dropped it between our seats. Out came the half-made chain mail shirt, then the pliers, and finally the smaller bag full of links waiting to be attached. Most Irwins are as insufferable as Shaun is when there's nothing to do, and chain mail seems to be a nearly-universal method of staying busy.
The funny thing is, he does know how to knit. I called his chain mail habit "knitting" one time too many when we were seventeen, and the next thing I knew he'd ordered needles and yarn online and taught himself from watching a few videos. He didn't stick with it long enough to learn to do anything fancy, but he got the basics down in just an hour or so, spent enough weeks working at it here and there to get comfortable with it, and then stopped once he was satisfied.
That experiment had two outcomes. The main one is that he now sometimes walks up to anyone he sees knitting in public and makes passably educated comments about their work. You haven't lived until you've seen a teenage boy in full body armor, armed to the teeth, wander up to a middle-aged woman and start discussing sock yarn--not that knitting is the province of middle-aged women, exactly, but he doesn't tend to approach women our age about much of anything, and not many men have the habit. Middle-aged women, on the other hand, often have the sense to feel safer with Shaun around, so if he feels like sitting there and admiring their lace work, they're usually happy to have him.
I heard a guy crack a joke about men knitting in Shaun's hearing once. Shaun, not so much out of passion for the topic as for the delight of taking someone down a peg, spent the next fifteen minutes explaining that men used to knit all the time until sometime in the twentieth century, and it was manly as hell and a valuable contribution to the war effort, fuck you very much.
The other lasting result of his brief foray into actually knitting rather than offering commentary on the subject is a scarf he made me. The scarf doesn't see nearly as much action as the chain mail he's put together for me, but I intend to keep that thing until I die, dropped stitches and all.
Originally posted at http://umadoshi.dreamwidth.org/437675.html. Comment here if you like, or comment there using OpenID. Comments at DW: