#I am the wip because I need to learn self-restraint and this thing called finishing the damn thing

[firewoodfigs]

📊 Current number of WIPs

I… honestly have too many to count 😂 off the top of my head, here���s what’s marinating in my Google drive as we speak!

for fma: (1) the next instalment of a study in reformation (college au royai; i was reminded of this by @eomma-jpeg and @thatisadamnfinecupofcoffee 😆) and (2) a fic centred around dressmaker!roy that i was discussing with @littlewitchbee the last time 🩵 i also have a song in the works and i really liked the lyrics for this one but i cannot for the life of me settle on a melody that appeases myself 🥲

for spy x family, aka my latest and current hyperfixation: (1) Eden AU, which will be a one-shot (famous last words but my brain cannot take anymore multichaps FR); (2) a 5+1 thing that’s basically a character study of Yor and is an excuse for me to write smut under the sloppy guise of healing from grief or whatever it is; (3) the next instalment of all the love we unravel, where we get a glimpse of protective loid (yes @nightofnyx8 I see you and I love you); (4) a ridiculously complicated longfic that is too much plot and too little writing, predicated on the tag ‘lovers to strangers to enemies to coparents to enemies/lovers’; (5) a song that is loosely related to (4); and (6) some other bits of family fluff in the form of very half-assed one-shots that may never see the light of day 😆

thanks for the ask!! I hope you have a wonderful start to the week 🩵

[oathkeeper-of-tarth]

I keep seeing something about writing three lines for a WIP? Posting three lines from three fics? Anyway I’ve seen it so many times at this point it’s become one big GO WRITE SOMETHING YOU ABSOLUTE NINNY for me, so here I am with three short-ish (~600 words each) segments from three tragically neglected WIPs that have nothing to do with each other. Very rough and rusty, but I hope you still enjoy these glimpses.

1. Bispearl week “swords” prompt ficlet I didn’t manage to finish back then, or: Bismuth and Pearl invent rubber ducking.

The first few swords were a disaster.

The Forge was rudimentary still - early days - didn’t look like much, but it was a start. Bismuth did her best: all of her hard-won knowledge, scrounged up information not meant for her or her kind, going towards building what she thought they would need to get weapon production up and running. Materials gathered at a great risk - Snowflake had chipped her gem during the last of the supply runs! Tools for Bismuth to try to replicate and experiment with, and a raided armoury with a wide variety of weapons for Bismuth to learn from, to suit every possible rebellious inclination. All arranged to enable what she judged might be a sensible workflow.

She decided to go with a simple, plain, straight-edged sword to start with - mid-length to her, meaning a dagger to some and a hefty two-hander to others. The sheer variety already present in the rebellion was half of its charm and point, wasn’t it just? And Bismuth wanted so very badly to fan the flames of it, to do everything she possibly could to see it, to see all of them, flourish and persevere and come out on top for once.

Bismuth tried, and tried, and tried again. Considered her mistakes, weaknesses, what she knew (or, doubt never failed to creep in, thought she knew) she was supposed to be doing and achieving here.

And failed.

The first blade that at least looked right shattered in her hands when she tried to force its tang through a guard and into a handle to put the whole thing together. The rest of its batch became hopelessly crooked when she quenched them.

She crushed the latest useless ingot she’d clearly gotten ore ratios wrong for in her fist and tossed it against the wall with a frustrated cry.

And of course, of course, that was the moment Pearl chose to walk in.

“Bismuth?”

Her voice was filled with concern as she inched closer from the entrance, but there was a glint in her eyes that made it clear Pearl would not be deterred.

So, figuring she had nothing to lose, Bismuth allowed her shoulders to sag and let her misery show.

“I’m not cut out for this. Literally.”

Pearl snorted, hopping up onto the anvil with a deliberate and highly unconvincing casual air. “Tell me about it.”

Bismuth sighed, rubbing the back of her neck with a tiredness she wasn’t sure she was supposed to be capable of, and leaned next to her.

“I ever tell you of my first actual visit to a forge?”

Pearl shook her head.

“Wasn’t that long ago. I took the chance and snuck into a weapon production plant when the hematites weren’t around. Me and the other bismuths had been working on some training grounds right next to it and I’d wanted to see one for so long, so one day I just went for it. And it was... Well. The last time that place had seen a bismuth was when it was being built. I didn’t even fit in there, Pearl. I was too big for the bellows and too small for the anvils, and I could barely walk around the quenching baths they had set up. It was all just… wrong. The whole place was screaming at me, telling me I didn’t belong there and couldn’t if I tried.”

“You’re still trying, though, despite that,” Pearl pointed out, and swept an arm out to seemingly encompass the entire Forge. “And look at all of this! You’ve been working so hard to make it your own.”

2. That HDM/Daemon AU that desperately needs updating - I AM SO SORRY - but here’s some actual (distressing) plot from the underground resistance meeting.

Pearl led Rose to a chair at an empty table near the wall, but didn’t sit down herself. Instead, she went over to the centre of the room where someone had brought out a projecting lantern and several small reels. Aristobulus stood tall at her side, stretching his long neck, and Pearl squared her narrow shoulders and cleared her throat.

The room’s attention was fully on her within moments. Pearl wasn’t what one would ever call a commanding presence, but there was an odd air of almost-imperiousness to her now that made both Rose and Neshu want to stop and listen - not their usual inclination at all.

“As you’ve no doubt heard, 37 people have been arrested by the Consistorial Court of Discipline in the last two months, including two of our own,” Pearl began. “After a cursory sentencing for heresy, all trace of them had vanished. We have now found records of the fates of some of them. I will warn you that these recordings are…” Pearl’s hands folded on each other nervously, “extremely distressing.”

At her nod, someone dimmed the lights and the projection started with the flick of a tiny switch, and all the murmuring that Pearl’s grim warning had prompted died down.

The silent scene hanging in the dusty air seemed to be the inside of a highly advanced laboratory, mostly taken up by strange devices Rose couldn’t fathom a purpose for. The only occupants of the room were a woman a little older than Rose herself, and two dour-looking men in long white overcoats, suggesting some sort of doctor or scholar.

Both the woman and her kestrel daemon were strapped into a particularly large and ominous-looking contraption, with odd metallic coils surrounding the bird. As one of the men approached and expertly plugged in the connectors on a series of cables, the coils started to vibrate and rapidly heat up - enough to emit a glow visible even in the grainy monotone of the recording.

Before their eyes, the kestrel seemed to take on a glow, too, thrashing about as much as the restraints allowed. But then its body started to elongate, its shape twisting and stretching in ways that should have been impossible, losing wings but gaining countless insect-like feet, the beak looking more like mandibles by the second.

Then- sparks, and sudden darkness, and the horrifying experiment cut short by what appeared to be a power outage, with the recording cutting out soon after.

The room was deathly quiet as the projection lit up again. The scene changed, but the same woman was the focus of the projection, now struggling against half a dozen uniformed guards.

The kestrel - back in its original form, it seemed - fought valiantly, leaving deep gouges for many of the guards to remember him by. His human kicked and bit and struggled. But ultimately it was in vain, and they were outmatched and outnumbered, and soon enough thoroughly overpowered and shoved into separate chambers of yet another machine.

Silver grates closed and locked behind both of them, while a similarly silvery guillotine shone above and between them menacingly, and seemed to hum in anticipation.

Pearl looked down at the floor - she had to have seen the recording before, and looking at her and the way Aristobulus was subtly nudging his head against her hand, Rose felt a dawning fear she, too, knew what was coming.

The blade came down.

The woman didn’t die, and the daemon didn’t disperse into so much dust. But they both looked like they wished they had as they were dragged away in opposite directions, without even a whisper of strained bond between them.

Rose struggled to force her fingers, clenched tightly in Neshu’s mane, to relax their grip even a bit.

The scene changed again, and no matter how much she wished she could, Rose didn’t look away.

3. The huge, huge Pearl/Rose fixit-ish fic that I started as an attempt to deal with the gag order mess when ASPR was still fresh. In this excerpt: some Rose/Pink sky arena angst that probably makes a lot more sense in context.

She still looks the part of the fierce rebel leader as her solid, quartz-heavy fists smash into the perfectly hewn pink stone over and over and over again (just the pink, only ever the pink). But her diamond-hard knuckles don’t bruise, don’t bear a trace even as the first floating insignia cracks and shatters into haphazardly hovering fragments.

And why would there ever be any mark left on her? She is, after all, just a spoiled, untouchable princess in disguise, playing a losing game that’s costing lives, making others dance a deadly dance to her self-indulgent little tune. And she could declare herself bored of it, give it all up and abandon them to horrible fates and go home whenever she wanted to in order to be relieved of this burden she clearly wasn’t ready for after all, such a shame... and they wouldn’t even know…!

The weight of the thoughts sends her spiralling back down to the pockmarked floor of the Arena, her landing nothing approaching elegant. A voice she knows she can’t possibly be hearing because its owner is in a (pink, always pink) bubble, hidden away, calls her a coward and a traitor.

She kneels in the ruins of her own making and wonders if Bismuth had a hand in carefully carving out what she has just smashed to pieces. If Bismuth would have cheered her on in this highly symbolic bit of destruction, in what is obviously a very defiant, political act with no practical or tactical purpose but with such a clear and pointed message. Everyone will readily believe that - why would they not?

Everyone except Pearl.

Pearl, who she has now so unthinkingly cruelly reminded of her station, reduced her (reduced them both!) to what they have supposedly been working on growing past and leaving behind. And for what? Because she was terrified, in that moment, that Pearl would find out the truth? That, inevitably, no matter how many Homeworld bases she snuck into and how many of the Moonbase’s systems she scoured, she’d find no trace of Bismuth anywhere, and she’d turn to Rose with those eyes large and shining with betrayal…

Just like they were earlier today, after I forbid it and I order you to stop.

The illusion and the beautiful make-believe are as broken as the symbol - the symbol of her - and how can she even think of considering herself any different from White now, demanding and taking and having her way, draining colour and will and personality to make way for the obedience due a Diamond? Pearl had gone so still, in the wake of the Order, all of her gestures, from nervous to exuberant, gone without a trace, posture stiff and perfect. It all seems a negligible step away from an empty smile on a newly bleached-white face and perfectly poised, outstretched arms; from being faced with an eerie automaton in the place of someone she dared to consider a friend.

She- oh, she wants to call herself Rose but she can’t, she’s not, she’s failed at that every step of the way so far. Pink curls her pristine hands into her fanciful dress nobody sensible would think to fight a war in, and cries, useless miraculous healing tears that couldn’t ever hope to begin fixing what she has so carelessly broken.