#Conversely I've used 'blood' and 'neon' like 200 times-- primarily because I describe Riley's eyes as neon a lot

[setaflow]

Find the Word/Manuscript Search Tag

Me coming in a month late to the tag game with Starbucks--

So I was tagged twice in the same tag game recently and figured I'd just knock them both out in one fell swoop. I pulled from a few different sources, including WIPs, warm-ups, and fridged work, so there's a little bit more variety considering I haven't published a ton. What I was given was:

@ghostoffuturespast's words: soft, neon, blood, & haze.

@glitchinginthegarden's words: collapse, follow, gentle, & lounge

Tagging @ghostoffuturespast @glitchinginthegarden @fly-amanitaa @callmeguacamole @beammeupbroadway @clusterfxckedbysirens @merge-conflict @ladykatie512 @seraphfighter and anyone else who'd like to give it a shot! Try out retort, sun, length, and knuckle

Soft

Silverhand doesn't respond immediately, but he does straighten up and crushes his cigarette on the end of the table (V doesn't miss the moment of hesitation as his hand hovers right over Rogue's own stub, but she doesn't comment on it). "About time," the attempt at lightheartedness is awfully forced and they both know it. "Felt pretty bad there, thinkin' you were gonna spend the rest of your life—" "Don't, don't," V pleads with a soft shake of her head. "You don't have to do that." "Do what?" "Pretend like you care."

Rain in the Desert, Chapter 5

Neon

The oil fields are unique in one regard. Night City goes out of its way to mask its malice, washing it out in neons or hiding it beneath the high rises. But this place won’t do that to you. It’s haunted, hateful, and brutally, utterly honest about it. These fields offer you a cautionary tale. Stories of what the world could’ve been: what the world has become instead. Harsh, horrible little truths. Because why lie about it? Who’s around to heed it, anyway? Humans don’t want ghost stories anymore. When one crops up, they’re happy to stick it all the way out here, where it’s easy to drown out the things they’re trying to tell you. There’s a reason V only watched those oil wells spit their little flames from so far away. The further you are from a truth, the easier it becomes to spin it into something else.

Fridged lines from Rain in the Desert, Chapter 16

Blood

He goes through the songs he knows like they’re the stages of grief. Denial comes first. Loud and sharp and distracting— whatever drowns out his thoughts the best. Some “Rock You Like a Hurricane”, a little “Thunderstruck”, most of “Strutter”, whatever rifts of “Second Conflict” Johnny remembers from hearing it on the radio. Anger comes like it usually does: aggressively, overpoweringly, unconsciously. Soon, he’s played “War Pigs” in its entirety and slams his way through “The Chain”, “Ramble On”, and “Barracuda” without even thinking about it. Bargaining’s harder to place until Johnny finds himself strumming those cliched breakup songs he used to put on when he felt pissy about an ex-output of his. Those ones that had some bitterness and drive in them, because what was he back then, if not driven and bitter? “Mary-Jane’s Last Dance”, “I Hate Myself For Loving You”, “Cold as Ice”, “You Give Love a Bad Name”. He plays them until the tempo he’s shouldering slows and the chords he’s playing lengthen, and whatever fire Johnny’d been drawing on has smoldered down into nothingness. His hands naturally find “Landslide” first, and before long, he’s gone through slow, depressing tune after slow, depressing tune: “Taxi”, then “Fire and Rain”, then “Vienna”. On and on and on. Acceptance doesn’t come. Johnny waits, plays, waits some more, plays some more, but all he can play are the sad songs, and they pile, and pile. “Desperado”. “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”. “Patience”. “Blackbird”. “Southern Cross”. “Dust in the Wind”. How does he know so many sad songs? Why were rockstars always so fucking sad all the time? Play something else! Anything else! He finally forces himself to quit after finishing the slowest, most pathetic version of “Going to California” he’s ever heard. When he’s done, V’s bloodied fingers fall to his lap, and he stares at the shuttered window until it occurs to him that it’s well past midnight.

In Media Res (Here, Besides the Rising Tide) (WIP)

Haze

Suddenly, V finds her body won't quite respond to her urgent thoughts. Staring into the depths of the sea, she feels every last bit of panic, horror, and dread collide in her head at once, leaving her rooted to the spot in a fear-induced haze. She might've damn well stood there like the biggest idiot alive and gave her ghost up to a fucking yacht explosion of all things if Johnny's disembodied voice hadn't yanked her back to reality, "Ground control to Major-fucking-V! You gonna stare into the water all night like you're fuckin' Narcissus, or you wanna get your ass in gear and bail 'fore the Maritime Demolitron blows you to kingdom come!?"

The Last Lost Continent

Collapse

"You're—" an astonished V stops just short of saying 'fucking with me' because she knows he's not, "Alright, what's the catch?" Silverhand removes his aviators and spins them by the temple, "I don't deal in catches, V. I think I've been pretty clear in what I want." Again, fair. "As I said, I like this 'bout as much as I like your driving, but if this is how you want to play it, then whatever." There it is again. That exact same look she saw down in the Afterlife. It's only for another split-second but V'd know it anywhere. The slight crease in his brow, the brief collapse of his furious expression, the faintest prick of some bottled-up emotion leaking through the cracks of this veneer: one he's worn for so long that he's forgotten how to take it off or is too scared to try. Silverhand closes his eyes for a beat longer than normal and just like that, it's gone. In that moment, a combination of optimism and cold-hard reality smacks V upside the head. She's cutting deals with her brain parasite. Because that's what he is. A brain parasite. Either things have gotten very dire very fast, Silverhand's psyche's done irreparable damage to her own sense of judgement— —or maybe he's raised some fair points concerning trust. How it's far easier to focus on saving your own ass when you don't have to worry about someone else stabbing you in it. Almost sounds like something her mother might've said once.

Rain in the Desert, Chapter 6

Follow

When we wrote the code, we didn’t make life; we made a mirror and we held it up. Everything that followed was born of the image glimpsed within it. Humans spend their entire lives trying to solve themselves. Code keeps succeeding, then starts looking to solve something else. Of course it does. We made it that way, after all. It was never given the chance to be anything else. What is the Net but an endless reflection of ourselves?

Rain in the Desert, Chapter 18 (WIP)

Gentle

The pair of them share that moment in a way only doomed people truly can— like it's the last gasp of air before a drowning man is sucked beneath pitch-black waters. "Hey kid? "Yeah, rockerboy?" "When this is all over, mind doin' me one thing?" "Hm?" "Get outta this fuckin' city," Johnny murmurs. "Just get on your bike and don't look back." The earnestness of the request hits her first, then the weight of it. All V can give him is a gentle shake of her head, her gaze falling towards the glittering skyline, "You know I can't do that." "Be able to do anythin' you damn well want once we're split. Who's gonna stop ya?" "No one," she admits, "and that's exactly why I can't go."

Rain in the Desert, Chapter 16

Lounge

She tried so goddamn hard to find a reason to pass on Kenner's offer, but everywhere V turned for an excuse, she only found a justification. Could've claimed she didn't like the fixer or just straight-up didn't want to work with someone who'd take a cut of her scratch, but Kenner had gone to her directly and promised her every last enny, no middleman. She couldn't say the job was dangerous, because it was as easy as breaking into an office building and stealing the files after hours. For fuck's sake, the video in question was of Kenner and a client taking turns ripping lines of Glitter off a stripper's bare ass in a 7th Hell VIP lounge— V's seen worse things in the back alley behind her megabuilding and Johnny'd done worse things with twice the posturing, half the money, and a quarter of the shame. There comes a time in every young edgerunner's life where the needs of the wallet outweigh all. And alas, V can preach about her values until she's blue in the face and the room has lost all its occupants, but it won't mean jack-diddly-squat in the end. Twenty thousand eddies is still twenty thousand eddies no matter whose pockets it's coming out of.

Rain in the Desert, Chapter 11