#wishbone snippet

[timeofjuly]

Wishbone Chapter 4 Snippet below the cut :)

Once you’ve fastened your buttons, Avery presses her hands together, looking you up and down with a pleased twitch of her pink lips. “Perfect.”

And indeed, you are perfect as you arrive at the Academy and are deposited at the front doors to be greeted by a frenzy of cameras. As you get out of the car, you see your reflection in their lenses, bloated and distorted in the curve of the glass. When you smile, your reflection smiles back, mouth too wide, eyes too small. The headache throbbing in your temples intensifies with each lumen as the cameras flash.

You are always being watched. In another life, you had even enjoyed it. You had liked standing in front of a crowd, answering questions correctly in a classroom and delivering impassioned arguments on debate team. Best speaker, always. You had been proud of that. There had been no greater rush than looking out at a group of people and knowing you held their full, unadulterated attention. That they liked you. That they thought you were clever. That you were someone worth listening to, someone deserving of attention and praise.

Those crowds are nothing like the ones you address today. You gaze out at people congregated in front of the Academy, held back by security just enough to give you a narrow walkway to the doors. A whole swarm and double the eyes. They yell and whistle, begging for you to look left, right, smile here, wave there.

As you look look at them, the eyes seem to swallow up their faces, eclipsing noses and lips, great gleaming swells of yellowed, bloodshot whites and colourful marble irises.

Marlo had liked marbles. You used to collect them together from an arcade machine, pooling your allowances to afford a meagre handful. Your twin would carry them around in their pocket in a little mesh bag; they never played games with them, but they liked to tumble them around their fingers when they got nervous. The sound of fear, the click clack of scrap glass and sillica.

[timeofjuly]

I absolutely love wishbone 💜💜💜 and I'd like to know if you are still updating that fic?because I'm ✨️so excited✨️ for the next chapter if there is one

Thank you so much! Don’t worry, Wishbone is very much still in the works, I am so invested in the story and it occupies a good 75% of my brain space. I’ve actually already finished the next chapter, but I want to finish the next two before I post it. I want to be able to post the chapters for Wishbone in batches of three, each separated by maybe a week or two.

But!!!! What I can do is give you another snippet of the next chapter as a thank you for reading the fic and checking in! I’ll pop it below the cut :)

You press your back against the locked door. You aren’t even sure why you’re so upset. The ask isn’t even that big - you just need to talk to your soulmate for long enough to get a handle on this bond. You don’t need to like him. You don’t even need him to like you. Maybe it’ll even be easy, a simple ITEM you can use, or a technique you can learn in an afternoon. Enough to eliminate the risk of him using your magic for his own purposes until you can break the bond.

That’s all. You can do that. You’ve done worse. Much worse. You’ve killed someone, remember, even if the Royal Scientist had reduced the monster to something less than a person long before that morning on the steps of the Embassy, and worse than that, you’d killed them for nothing.

And yet, the mere thought of speaking to your soulmate again makes you feel sicker than that ever did. He is the only person - god, the only person since Marlo, and isn’t that an awful thing to realise - who has seen you in your entirety, no subterfuge, no lies, no hiding. ‘not a lot that you’re gonna be able to get past me’, he had said, and you hadn’t even thought anything of it at the time. You’d been too focused on hurting him to think about the implications of that statement, and you’re paying for your oversight now.

[timeofjuly]

I have. So many WIPs I should be working on and none of them are Wishbone. So what am I writing right now?

Another snippet of Wishbone, the swapfell bros/reader reluctant soulmate fic I’ve been chipping away at, below the cut.

Anger writhes in Sans’ chest. Of all the people, all the humans, all the mages, why does it have to be you?

You, the reviled Second Mage, soul shining yellow and cracked almost clean down the middle. You, vicious and grasping and choking on your own bitterness, ready to cleave the world in two if it’ll give you a scrap of the justice you think you deserve.

You, who spends your days cold-faced and callous in negotiations with monsters, only to distort into the young, attractive face of the mage’s at night. You sit in front of late-night talk show hosts, trotted out to smile and giggle and perform little parlour tricks. Blazing rings of fire, dazzling displays of gravity magic. You are always made-up prettily and always dressed in yellow. Golden. Resplendent. You say the right things and laugh sweetly and humans all around the world can pretend that mages are harmless. Benign.

They don’t see the decay hangs around you, the rot of something already dead.

Back Underground, it was the look of a monster on the cusp of falling down. The humans don’t see it, of course, but when you’d shambled in to the very first meeting after your twin’s death, every single monster in the room had looked at you and seen a walking corpse.

Your magic is the only thing alive about you. It burns like living fire. When you get angry, your expression stays impassive, but the room always heats up a degree or two. Sans has taken to wearing less layers on the days he knows he’ll be unfortunate enough to be in your presence.