Rules: In a new post, list the names of all the files in your WIP folder, regardless of how non-descriptive or ridiculous. Let people send you an ask with the title that most intrigues them and then post a little snippet of it or tell them something about it! And then tag as many people as you have WIPs.
Okay SO I'm, uh, gonna be a little selective about my rule adherence because the amount of files in either my art or writing WIP folders (yes plural for each medium) is, uh.
*laughs nervously*
so I'm just gonna go with the most recently edited from the writing projects, which iiiiiiis apparently the Throne-breaker section for Jedi Under Siege, which I'm spitballing at around 4 chapters. Ironically, my file names are pretty descriptive instead of nonsensical (I lose track of where I am on title alone so I have to be descriptive :P) In order, we have:
Finding Footing (Aja makes gestures towards an alliance with the Republic, Chrysali and Theron figure out a work/personal life balance)
The Ossus Enclave (Aja reunites with old friends and prepares for battle)
Jedi Under Siege (main part of the conflict here)
The Monster Under the Bed (Malgus return)
Tags, right, tags, paging @queen-scribbles @tiredassmage @frauleiiin aaaand @per-astraea (sorry if you've gotten tagged already, my brains is scrampled eggies)
(Call it the sickness it is: that doubt does not exist is a thought that gives shelter; that death, in its trial, shall not hold.)
Rust gets led beneath the yellow line by out-of-state, gaze dusting across everything in the hoarder's back room, faded but focussed. Remains of magazines high against the walls like pillars; always-been-there. Cindered-up and waterlogged now, sagging, into abstract responses, sea-weeded across the crime-scene - ads, columns - advents dropped off.
House was burning twelve hours ago. None in, or out, yet through the remains of a black doorway, the victim lays wing-down, untouched by the fire and impossibly whole. No burns but a red ring around the neck.
Rust tenses his grip of the pencil. Eyes flick on Joan as he joins her; and off.
this is a bad time to talk about your problems. / alma @ rust
always accepting.
“I don't have problems.”
Nature breathes on behind them. Everything unseen hums, as if expressing contempt for Rust, or ridicule. No certain urge to tell that story. “If all we did was what another does, had what another had, how are we not just that same another?”
The best thing about celebrating New Years on a fishing boat 150 miles off the Alaskan coast? Rust hasn’t had to listen to fireworks in six years.
The worst part? He also hasn’t rung dead center on a toilet after getting a gut full of cheap whiskey in six years.
He lets out a low groan and settles for laying flat on his back. The cold and the sea seeps into everything out here, and it attaches itself almost greedily to his clothes. Bile coats his teeth and his tongue and he stares at the peeling paint on the ceiling through half lidded eyes and wonders, not for the first time, when he lost control of his life.
Did he ever really have any in the first place?
Does anyone?
Maybe those are the things we, as evolved as we like to view ourselves, aren’t supposed to get the answers for. We live in a world where nothing else is solved, why should this?
Why should any of it?
He lays on the floor until the captain manages to find him in the morning, banging against the door and hollering for him to get up or die already. Bleary eyed, he sits and blinks in the now too bright light, and is disappointed to see die is once again not an option.
He finishes this run out on the trawler and makes it back to land on January fourth with a wad of cash and a deep ache in his bones.
The cash is new. The ache is not.
When he’s not on the water, he has a shitty excuse of a cabin he holes up in. A quick stop in the closest town to collect provisions, including the newspapers he has mailed all the way from Louisiana, and then back to seclusion until his latest paycheck or his booze runs out.
Whichever comes first.
When he’s finally settled in, the headline out of New Orleans plunges him back into 1995; back into a hot, humid summer where nothing good came of anything.
A dead woman in a field, a crown of antlers on her head. A messy spiral drawn down her back.
“But Reggie’s dead.” He is not aware he’s speaking as his eyes scan the pages. “Marty shot your methed up brains all over the place, we got you.”
As he reads, he latches onto the idea of a copycat, but no matter how much he wants to cling to that he knows it’s wrong. He knew it in 2002. He knew it when he quit CID, and he’s known it every night under the Alaskan stars.
He knows that knowing is why he came back to this god forsaken place at all. If he ran far enough and if he drank enough he could make himself forget. Forget the curse he brought upon himself, the curse he brings upon others. He told himself he was looking for peace but really he was looking for an easy out.
“Ain’t nothing in this life fucking easy boy, and you best learn that.” His father had once said, slamming a door in his face.
“Shit, pop,” he says softly, eyes still glued to the newspaper. “You always did bide your time for the ‘I told you so’s.”
The quickness with which he is able to dismantle and pack up six years of his life is unsurprising to him. Even still, it fills him with a type of melancholy he’s unsure how to place.
He chooses to blame it on his ever lasting hatred of the cold, and tells himself it’ll wear off when he’s finally in a warm climate again.
He tells himself a lot of things on the long trip back to Louisiana.
He knows better than to tell himself he believes any of it.
