#stray wips

[straycatfish]

WIP WEDNESDAY BABEY

method-writing chapter 2 of wayward and flickering existence by having a long covid flareup lmao. i think it's because i cleaned the house. cry.

anyway, Them:

She has a few follow-up questions. They start to trickle in after a couple days’ silence, during which he’d slept poorly, fed messily, dreamt wildly. Natural that she’d need time, to let the shock ease off and have a legitimate freakout, or maybe file some kind of report against him. Hopefully just the former. The first text makes him laugh. What about garlic? No effect, he types back. Can’t even taste the stuff now. Still grieving that one. Ellipses appear and vanish a few times, then: Been there. Lost my sense of taste for half a year. Another pause. Sincere condolences. Armand stops asking who Daniel’s talking to pretty soon after the first few exchanges, and moves on to sighing and slithering out the window when the phone dings. It’s on its way to becoming a problem, and Daniel guesses he should feel worse than he does about it. But it’s nice, this reconnecting. Nice to talk to someone human, for however long Alice will entertain him. Besides, if Armand wants something specific from Daniel, he could try actually saying so.

[straycatfish]

wip wednesday, why not

working on a sequel to the armand/daniel/alice snowstorm fic, post-daniel's-turning. it's gonna be cute and sad and hopeeeefully also good fun, and I'm really excited about it. excerpttttttt:

‘These vampires of yours.’ She's cynical, like any reasonable person would be. ‘You say they’re psychic? Or telepathic, whatever?’ ‘Hah,' he says. 'The old what am I thinking test? Sure. But I want you to know I have been staying out of your head. I just want you to know that, after. Because I know what it’s like when these fuckers don’t.’ Still thinking of them as a class apart from himself, but then he’s been 70 years in the flesh and less than one in the blood. Louis had trouble letting go at only 33. ‘But if you’re inviting me in…’ Oh my god. And isn’t that nice, that the thought floating at the forefront of all the other buzzing things is that old familiar refrain. Oh my god, and what the fuck is wrong with you. Some new flavour to it, though. It’s embarrassing, is what it is and Couldn’t you have a slightly more normal end of life crisis? What am I saying. Of course you couldn’t. ‘Eh, well,’ he says, with a sheepish wave of his hands. ‘Is there a way to actually be normal about the end of your life?’

[straycatfish]

uh oh wip wednesday again?

i thought i was gonna be finished with this last weekend but it's turned into a beast. praying 2 be finished by THIS weekend ;__;

It was in the afternoon of an especially rough day’s sleep that he’d thumbed his phone open and pulled up his and Alice’s chat history. Armand absent, skin tacky in his cool sheets, blackout curtains not quite closed. Cracks of winter light mocking their way into his bedroom-turned-mausoleum. Remnants of dreams: Alice’s face, Armand’s face, flickering into one and then apart again. Sudden and overwhelming churn of horror at the thought that she was never real. Except he knew she was. Except there were their messages, safe and ordinary. Slow trickle of information in both directions over the past several years – lawyer shit, daughter shit, hospital shit. Little evidence of affection, but in that moment he couldn’t have felt warmer towards that series of sparse, pragmatic sentences. He’d dozed again, mentally tracing their intersecting lives as far back as he could into the haze. And then jolted awake with another image: a four-poster bed, lights low, the Alice that had somehow held him from the front and back at the same time now splitting in two, because it was both of them. It was both of them.

(two of them . . . )

[straycatfish]

wip wednesday choo choo

pleading with my body to let me have the energy to finish and post this chapter this weekend :')

for now, things are going just fine in a certain brooklyn apartment...

‘I’d understand, of course, if you wished to take a mortal lover. I can hardly deny you that.’ ‘Gracious of you,’ says Daniel. ‘But must it be–’ ‘What? Must it be what? The woman you corrupted my actual memories of to the point that I’m still picking apart what I felt for her versus you?’ ‘I was going to say somebody who made it very clear they wanted to be rid of you,’ Armand sighs, all patience and reason. ‘It’s a short walk into a sea of troubles.’ ‘Sweetness, I’m not taking advice from you on interpersonal relationships of any sort. Besides, it’s not like that.’