#draft bits

[eluviannaa]

Curses & Curios had emptied for the evening, leaving Eluvianna with a disgrace of drafts strewn across her writing desk. With exactly one week until the event, the time for procrastination had ended. More than.

Tapping the feather against a cheek, she studied two sheets before her. One a battlefield of revisions, the other pristine and unnervingly full of potential.

A slow breath. A flourish of ink:

4—Fel & Fanfare

Professor Gravewither stood beside Ambrose like a heretic, his very presence at odds with the overdone floral archway floating above them. Blush silks and petals swayed with magic, hopeful they might somehow dispel the warlock's severity: dark leather hung from his shoulders like ceremonial vestments—no shirt, naturally—and a sprawling design of Dreadscar across his chest.

Mourvalis tried his best to look normal. The crowd seemed vaguely intrigued by the effort, though still unsure whether they had mistakenly stumbled upon a demonic tribunal or the whimsical demonstration that had been advertised.

Stepping forward with all the enthusiasm of one facing punishment not to his taste, he prepared to speak.

“Welcome,” he boomed, the tone typically reserved for delivering his more foreboding lectures.

Several awkward smiles lifted from the crowd. Even, a brave shout from the back—“Take off your shirt!”

Mourvalis ignored the demand, clearly ahead of it.

As a clock tolled the late hour, she finally released the quill, watching it dart off on some mysterious errand. She, too, would drift toward her own: a quiet ritual with a kettle.

@dark-desires-and-daggerwork

[morningmightcomebyaccident]

For the first time in quite a while my brain is trying to feed me fanfic lines and so I jotted a bit down but I'm not sure I want to pursue the threads. Gonna let it marinate and see if something emerges. Maybe the S2 finale will spark or stifle the urge.

After some time, when years of iterations had tweaked and altered the scenarios, Cate could no longer say whose thoughts had originated the daydreams, hers or her parents'. During those years there was a lot of time to think, and everyone around her did a lot of thinking, and so Cate did a lot of thinking, too, about what they thought like they were her own thoughts.

They started in different ways, maybe the doorbell rang or there was a phone call or a police cruiser rolled up the driveway, but they all ended in the same way: Caleb, smiling, returned. In the early versions Caleb, alive and whole and well, maybe hungrier for wear, had had to wait for the compulsion to wear off and he'd come running back the moment he could. Maybe some nice folk found him and tried to get him home right away but he refused their help, at first, because he had to, because of Cate's orders, but the spell wore off and they got him home. In subsequent retellings, Caleb aged, he'd come back with different stories and explanations about he survived, but always he was just waiting to return, eager to be reunited with them.

Cate's parents never stopped hoping.

Or maybe Cate never stopped hoping.

If Caleb came back maybe her parents would see that everything was ok, that Cate hadn't meant to cause Caleb any harm, that they could let Cate out of her room, that there didn't need to be a door that locked her in because Cate understood now what her powers were, what might happen, and she wouldn't do that again, and maybe her parents could stop looking at her like she was the vilest, most grotesque creature on the planet, and maybe even stop thinking it. Maybe all of them--her parents, Caleb, and Cate--could sit down together at the dinner table and have a meal. Maybe they'd all laugh. Maybe they'd all be happy. Maybe her mother and father would hug her. 

Maybe.

Caleb never came back.

So Cate could never say.

*

A lifetime of isolated homeschooling did nothing to prepare Cate for the number of people who thought about wanting to fuck her. Even with the medication, the thoughts leaked in. The first instances were shocking--and confusing. The sources were mostly men, the older the more egregious, in the most mundane settings, after the barest of introductions or across-the-room sightings. 

*

Cate had an idea of what friends were supposed to be, what they were supposed to do, formed from the media that had kept her company in her room and, later, the thoughts warm and dark, supportive and jealous, loyal and resentful of a student body surrounding her.

That is to say, Cate was never sure she was doing friendship correctly but she wasn't sure anyone else knew how to do it either. 

Sometimes Cate looked at Jordan, bitter at their parents for being unable to accept them in their entirety, and wondered if her parents maybe could have loved her if the Compound V had made her a bigender child and not a telepath they were scared to touch. By comparison, maybe, like if her parents had been exposed to the telepathy first and then were offered the option of switching their child's powers, like software that could be deleted and installed.

Cate liked Luke and Andre, a lot, how they rolled through life with the confidence conferred by the envy of others, but Jordan could understand on some level the denial that haunted Cate: that for her parents it surely wasn't about who Cate was, but what, that if the powers that had manifested had been different, the story could have been different, too. That, beyond all the confusing frills on the surface, there was someone loveable beneath.

They had to believe that.

There were days, late nights, that Cate wished she could tell Jordan that she understood, but no one really likes knowing someone can read your mind.

Cate knew that, too.

But she couldn't help it.

Her inability to prevent hearing, though, never changed any judgment on the fact that she did, so maybe there really wasn't someone loveable underneath if this was who Cate was.

What people didn't know she knew couldn't hurt them.

*

[cloudauditorefair]

Let's be emotionally not okay together with a peek at my draft bits!

Today, the sky was falling.

The shrill sound of a reaper Miranda couldn’t hear but could feel in her bones, followed by its beam going exactly where she had hoped someone’s god would keep it from.

The sun was ripped from its place and the stars began to plummet.

Her heart screamed its refusal, its denial, its act of shattering. It continued even as the enemy advanced on her and bullets hit her barrier and she couldn’t look away from her falling sky.

Her heart screamed and she felt the world go cold.

[the-papersmith]

I knew from an early age that I would like my soulmate. The burn of scraped knees and the feeling of hair-pulling told me that she was a rough-and-tumble kind of girl, which was the only kind I really cared to talk to.

“That’s a special gift you’ve got,” My mother would tell me, putting ice on the twisted ankle that I was feeling, despite not having injured myself in the least. “These are the things your soulmate is feeling. Your grandmother was the same way.”

With that, I accepted it. Out of curiosity, I would always look for the girls with the skinned elbows and bruised shins when I was in elementary school, wondering if I knew her already.

Of course, that all became moot once I hit middle school. I had never understood what the big deal was with girls, even when all of my friends were already taking notice of developing chests and long lashes. That was when I was certain - there was no point in me looking for a woman, because I wouldn’t be interested in spending the rest of my life with one, at least not in a romantic sense.