#ch: nile whist

[revenancy]

impossible fires || dovey macewan.

She grabs him by the chin, quick as a viper, her nails sinking deep into his skin. He draws a deep breath to steel himself, but that’s a mistake; all he can taste is the soft echo of rot and disinfectant on her hands.

image text in alt text.

impossible fires taglist (ask to be added or removed)

@iucemon @rodentwrites @rhikasa

[revenancy]

impossible fires || nile whist.

obligatory content warning for anything related to Nile: repeated mentions of suicide and death,

including the idea that the former self was "killed." he was 20 and desperate and hopeless back then, and now he's none of those things, so he's better now, right?

right?

→ reborn 13 years ago from the shadow of a suicide and pulled back from the edge countless times by Dovey, who gave him another chance under the Stillwater Gospel. she encouraged him to live his life for himself: his family wouldn't have him; he could still pick up and carry on.

→ for the first 10 years he was proud of his devotion to the Gospel. he was proud of his new family – Nile's family. Nile's life. Nile's purpose. he was still convinced he had purpose.

→ 3 years ago he was hired by Somatik, a small security firm and child company of Fallon Tactical based in L3, as a remote technician. Somatik pays for his apartment in Lychester; if not for them, he'd still be living with the rest of the Gospel in the rotting corpse of Sacred Spring Hospital.

→ now, he's run into a memory from his life – before. before the Gospel. before he killed himself and rose anew. before Violet. and god does it hurt to think about Violet now.

→ he's successful, isn't he? he's got everything he asks for. everything he could ever want.

→ that's a dead man's family.

→ pick up. carry on.

[revenancy]

@iucemon calling me out for literally every love interest I've created in the wildest, most accurate deathblow i've ever received

[revenancy]

impossible fires | L4

so let's talk a bit about this wip.

warnings for mentions of suicide, drug use, and religion;

marley haight is a thirty-year-old dropout who's never quite moved on past the 'dropout' phase. she can't hold down a friendship, let alone a job. she's depressed, irritated by the people around her, and dependent on synthesized highs to get her through the day.

jacín rial is a priest who doesn't believe, who inherited this church and this congregation from his father. he was going to play baseball. get famous. move to L2. and instead he's been put on this pedestal of holiness since he was eighteen years old and expected to deal.

nile whist – the fake name, easier than the real one – killed himself thirteen years ago. then he woke up in the arms of a gospel that understood him. he sees the sideways looks; let them blaspheme. silence is a small thing to ask in exchange for certainty. purpose. identity.

what they have in common:

they're trapped on L4, the most populous level of the generational spaceship where they were born and raised. they share a mess of humanity, a crush of breath and filthy hope, the heat of three hundred thousand people forced to coexist –

and the same ghost haunting their past.

[revenancy]

sometimes writing is just.

[revenancy]

one of these days i will make a post again (still working on impossible fires, just a little slower, life is weird rn)

but in the meantime have Nile Whist – a fake name, easier than the real one – and the lies you tell to keep yourself sane:

[revenancy]

sometimes my goal when writing is to make the love interest the worst possible person that could have occupied that role

[revenancy]

i was gonna make a polycule excel spreadsheet joke but honestly. Eliza Fallon would do that. "this is my husband, Phil, and my boyfriend, Yuki, and Yuki's partner, Aran, and" so many degrees of separation.

lachlan/marley/yuki is far from endgame for any of them, it's a toxic spiraling possessive traumatic mess and they're going to fall apart in 6 months or less, but it's probably how they get through the end of the plot without fucking dying

sending u good vibes & i hope writing is going well!!

( a little impossible fires would be fun to hear about if you're up to it! 👀 )

thank you!!!

writing is... not going very fast rn. combination of life stuff + my keyboard dying + not being able to type at night now bc my backup keyboard is a Loud Mechanical Monstrosity (i love her she's pink). but i'm still thinking abt IF always!!

right now I'm reckoning with Yuki's plot, trying to figure out the tail end: rich poly lawyer boy gets completely disenfranchised and effectively demoted to civilian, and it becomes a question of how does he take this? how does he process it?

he's lived in unimaginable wealth his entire life but throughout the first half of this draft he's come across as (relatively) down-to-earth (in comparison to the other L2 characters). he and Eliza are the only people on L2 who make sense, and even then, Eliza has gilded heels on her shoes + she's flirting with a divorce suit by getting involved with Yuki again.

but you take a man and break him down to his simplest passions and you have Yuki feeding the feral cats on L4, slowly befriending them, sitting on the fire escape outside someone else's (rapidly crowded) apartment (Jaci only has so much space and now there are four people living there and none of them are his girlfriend) with a cigarette in hand watching the simulated dayglow fade

right now I'm trying to figure out exactly how unstable his emotional state is going to be, and how he'd deal with all of this -- being on L4 avoiding the people who are hunting him down, losing his wealth, losing his connection to Eliza, losing everything that in his opinion made him Katsura Yukimori -- and then, while he's no one, finding out his father is dead --

it's gonna be fun!~