#fader fic

[selkiefinalist]

ur fader wip was one of the first things i thought of when i saw the floral travii!!!

oh, goodness. i think i am too afraid of fader. you know, one of those things where it has a life of its own and i’m not sure how to wrangle it into its proper shape. but i am glad the floral travii have somehow summoned this wip for you, it needs all the summoning energy to call it into existence, I feel like

[selkiefinalist]

i'd love to hear about one of your WIPs for the ask meme!!

oh this is tough, because i have that impulse to try to please people and this is so open-ended hahahaha.

the WIP i’m working on now and i’m determined not to abandon is fader fic, which is a fic in which i try to answer: how might you fall in love with someone, or start to anyway, without having ever met them? and when i started thinking through that concept, i decided it had to happen in a universe in which some people randomly (well, not really randomly but i can’t give away all my secrets) fade into some other kind of existence that isn’t known or fully understood by those who remain, in which those who have faded have historically continued to interact with their loved ones in a manner similar to what i’d call a residual haunting. so, we know they still exist in some fashion. but how? and why don’t they just come back?

and then i was working through this late last summer/early fall, when travis sanheim, my favorite were-goat son, absolutely emotionally obliterated me with that post about tk visiting his hometown and i spent several months (like 6) thinking about how I’d write the damn fic but the truth is it’s going to be really hard to pull off and i will most certainly not meet my own expectations and i’ve been protecting myself from that experience for awhile and it’s just time to let it happen. here’s a snippet from part way in, when sandra and tk have started to work out a kind of system of engagement:

Observations: the beer was there when Travis got home from work. When he got back from running. When he went to bed. But some time between bed and morning, the beer was gone. It made sense, based on Travis's single experience with Other Travis, in person, and the stories people told him all day at the lab. But now he could start to form a hypothesis. Were other displaced people also able to physically manifest? As far as he knew, there weren't any recorded incidents of re-encounter.

He pushed his bedtime back in increments. 10:30: beer there. 10:45: beer there. 11:30: beer still there. But by morning: gone.

By Wednesday the six pack was empty. Reaching into the fridge in the morning for eggs, and there it was: empty six-pack, new note.

More, please?

Other Travis was polite, at least. And if he'd been without beer for the better part of a year. Well, Travis couldn't blame him.

Turned out he was out of post-it notes, so he crammed Okay onto the bottom of the original note, drew an arrow up to Other Travis’s message for good measure, and stuck it back on as best he could. Voila.

[selkiefinalist]

for the WIP game, “hand” or “street” or “red”!

oooh i was hoping for something from that scrapped sidgeno divorce fic but here’s something from fader, instead:

For at least three seconds, Travis sat there, stumped, Voracek’s Guide to Effective Interviewing running like water through the loosely-cupped hand of his brain.

[selkiefinalist]

okay since I can’t get the ask to work on the fic blog I’m gonna ask about fader instead

ok, here’s some fader. for clarity’s sake (lmao), sandra is our humble narrator. fader has a complicated premise, but this is the first time he meets tk in person:

The bridge formed out of the darkness when they rounded the corner. It was barely more than one lane and shiny with ice under the truck’s headlights. Mackie always said he was going to put up a railing, but talk was cheap.

“Careful,” Taylor said, as Travis pulled the truck onto the bridge’s narrow path.

“Yeah, yeah.” Travis knew already how it was going to go. Still, the bottom of his stomach fell out when the truck swerved and skidded, and the back end swung wildly from one side of the bridge to the other.

He clutched the wheel, though it never made a difference, and turned his head in time to see Taylor bracing himself against the dashboard, before the truck slid off the side of the bridge.

They landed in the river. He could never make sense of this part, afterwards - one second, they were falling; the next second, they were in the truck, in the river, water ankle-deep in the cab and coming in fast.

Travis clawed himself out of his seatbelt and went to kick out his window, like usual. But this time the window was stuck. Taylor moaned next to him in the passenger’s seat. His forehead was streaked with blood.

“Hang on,” he said. Panic clawed at him, its grip as familiar as the icy water pouring into the truck. He kept kicking at the window. Again, again. But the window was stuck. The water was up to the seat, now. There wasn’t anything he could do. “Help,” he yelled. Like Mackie could hear them from half a mile away. Everything was cold. The river sucked at the truck, pushing it around in the water.

It was pitch-black in the cab. Taylor was so quiet - was he even still there? Sometimes he wasn’t, anymore. Travis turned to look, but something was pinning his shoulders back, shaking him like a dog.

“Buddy, buddy, hey. Wake up.”

It wasn’t the water, or some new trick of his dream. There were actual hands on his shoulders, shaking him awake. Hands, attached to body, looming over Travis in the dark of his room —

“Don’t scream, don’t scream.” The dude tried to clamp a hand over Travis’s mouth, but Travis didn’t grow up with a twin brother for nothing. He was always prepared for unexpected assault. He yanked the hand away from his face and kept pulling, jerking the other guy off-balance, twisting his wrist and making him stumble into the bed frame. “Well, fuck you, then,” he said, and disappeared.

[selkiefinalist]

The day Travis moved in was brutally cold. The kind that edged its way into everything, froze the air in his nose and his throat. It was headache-bright that morning, bruised at the edges with hangover like he was. The guys at the lab had taken him out two nights ago as a send-off, and he was still suffering. Chalk it up to getting older, probably.

The apartment was above a pharmacy, which itself was next to a bar, a genius move of proximital effectiveness.

[selkiefinalist]

Did you hit 3k yet? May have a growing investment in this fic since that video dropped yesterday, help me out here

we have arrived at full commitment, i think! anyway i don’t want to jinx it by talking about it so you’ll either see it in 3 months or we’ll just pretend it was never going to happen