#coffin and mourners wip

[basalting]

can i ask about what youve got planned for chapter 2 of the angat fic you posted?

the angst fic in question

so without spoiling everything (and bearing in mind that not all of this will end up in the fic) this is what ive got planned

dick coming back to gotham and all of the messiness that entails

his fight with bruce

his fight with ALFRED

maybe even his fight with BABS

his grief and guilt over jason

alfred and his perspective over everything

thinking about how loss has changed bruce before and how it will change him now (aka my headcanon that after his parents died bruce became extremely agoraphobic and the struggles relating to him dealing with that)

now that bruce is throwing himself into work and being batman the manor is back to being as silent as it was when bruce was gone

him going to see jason during his weekly visit to thomas and martha

alfred trying to reach out to dick and being rebuffed

alfred setting up the memorial in the cave??????

harvey stewing in arkham

his POV of returning to arkham with bruce after the funeral

my take on that harvey beating the joker up post i made lol

[pangaeaseas]

Fic Writing Tag Game

tagged by @wisteria-lodge

How many fics do you have on ao3? 36, most of which are one-shots.

What's your total ao3 word count? 82,319

What are your top 5 stories by kudos?

1. bring out the coffin, let the mourners come is unsurprisingly my top fic as it rides the regulus black wave. the summary is something like 'regulus dies, Sirius finds out' and that's exactly what happens. it's not my finest work (I don't think it does anything particularly striking with the material) and i'm not particularly proud of it, but I'm glad people enjoy it!

2. remembering past enchantments and past ills is my first hp fic on ao3 and since it does have a more interesting idea I am quite proud of it. it's about ginny as a parselmouth. It seems to have been the fic that pushed the Parselmout Ginny tag into full reality, lol.

3. A Fistful of Miracles was written for a fic exchange and is probably the most successful piece of romance I have written thus far, though there's growing pains. Got me into Narlily! My current WIP is influenced by it but will hopefully be better. The title just kind of came to me and had to be shoehorned in, lol.

4. but I am not resigned is possibly the fic I'm proudest of thus far. It does much more interesting things with regulus black tbh than any of my other fics with him. I've also gotten good comments on this one from people who picked up the themes because it has themes yo! mostly holds up very well except for the random JFK assassination conversation lol. and it's actually about Hermione.

5. Misery With Company is one of the longest things i've ever written at a whopping 6000+ words and is almost entirely ginny and Sirius, two of my absolute favorite characters, talking to each other. some of the dialogue is a bit stilted but I'm still pretty proud of it. and they somehow managed to never mention JFK. good for them. gave me a whole new brotp.

Do you respond to comments? Yep, all of them, even the ones that are just a crying emoji. I love talking about my fic!

What's the fic you've written with the angstiest ending? Hmmm I have to think about this one. Honestly it's probably the Anna Karenina one (high school was a dark dark time don't ask why I was writing fucking pretentious af ao3 fanfiction about Tolstoy characters...) because the patriarchy cannot be defeated in the way Voldemort can.

Or it might be the cauldron of morning, which features some of the darkest character headspace i've ever been in. especially given I was purposefully trying to make the ending brutally ironic.

What's the fic you've written with the happiest ending?

Ummm uhhh...probably remembering past enchantments and past ills because it's all about self acceptance and healing or A Fistful of Miracles which is actually canon divergent, or maybe Indoor Quidditch, my canon compliant Andy and Narcissa fic, which is ultimately about finding hope and healing after very dark times. Honestly them coming to a better place with so much to work through might make me happiest bc it's about pulling yourself up from the lowest lows. so yeah the fic where one of the main characters is mourning her husband, daughter, and the sister who killed her daughter might be my 'happiest ending'.

Yes, I love angst.

Do you write crossovers? ....Does the Tolstoy thing count?

When I was a kid I had an extensive HP/PJO crossover universe that never came to fruition. Honestly not sure I would do many crossovers, especially with universes that are mutually exclusive (for instance, a HOTD/HP crossover would be pretty pointless since they're on different fucking planets and putting Rhaenicent in HP would make them completely different people).

So I guess if I think there's something to be gained from crossing over, or if it's a shared universe kind of thing (same author, etc). But not often.

Have you ever received hate on a fic? No, but I did get someone who said they hated me and elaborated in the next comment it was because I had inflicted emotional trauma on them with my fanfiction. Scared me for five minutes lol.

Do you write smut? Nope.

Have you ever had a fic stolen? Hope not.

Have you ever had a fic translated? No, but I did have a podfic once, it was great!

Have you ever co-written a fic before? No, but I've edited other people's fics, which is quite fun! Also I gave my friend a bunch of OCs once. In public.

What's a wip that you want to finish but don't think you ever will? I came up with an extensive plot and wrote about 500 words of a crack fic where Draco Malfoy has to be Delphi's teen mom which is sadly unlikely to ever see the light of day.

I also have a very very ambitious longfic project with several thousand words of worldbuilding and the complete plot of...the first book of a necessary several. that one maybe i'll come back to once I have more life experience lol.

What are your writing strengths? I can do pretty prose if I work at it. I'm pretty good with voice. I also write and come up with good scenes. Oh and ideas. Premises.

What are your writing weaknesses? PACING and actually finishing things lol. Occasionally dialogue? Sometimes I think I'm good at dialogue, sometimes I hate all my dialogue. I use too many similes and run-ons. I tend to exposit a lot in the name of pretty prose rather than actually fucking scening it out. I need to work on showing and not telling lol.

What are your thoughts on writing dialogue in other languages in a fic? Never done it, unlikely to do it since a) I only speak one other language and that not very well and b) it's fic and it feels a little mean to make the reader of the thing they are reading for fun for free go look up some French words. Maybe if I knew how to code in the little hovering insta-translate thing. Or spoke better French.

What's a fandom/ship you haven't written for yet but want to? Ship: Romione (the aforementioned unwritten longfic WIP has Romione romance as a major subplot). Wolfstar, which bizarrely I have never written. Honestly I could buy a Draco/Harry/Ginny polycule, or either Drarry or Drinny. Possibly Lilypad. Bellamort would be a substantial challenge.

Fandom: Can't wait to finish Game of Thrones (TV) so I can mock its ending in fic LMAO. More seriously I want to write Scholomance fic, but am a little intimidated by the quality of Naomi Novik.

If I was really crazy and also had a PhD in Russian literature I would write the incredibly deranged fic idea that haunts my brain and begs to be written about shatov and kirillov lying on the floor of that hut in America, which sadly has never been made into slash fic as far as I know and absolutely should be.

This was fun!

tagging: @slitheringghost, @copper-dust, @thistlecatfics, @nyx764, (please feel free to ignore this lol) and anyone else who wants to play!

[authorangelita]

You have too many amazing sounding WIPs! How am I suppose to choose?!!

I’ll just select one from each category🤓

Casket is Empty

Grave Danger Fusion

LOL - good choices!

Casket is Empty is 400 words of the beginning of a story, but I don't know what the story entails yet. Essentially Mac realizes that Jack wasn't in the coffin at his funeral and then I'm not sure where the story goes (aside from Mac bringing Jack home, of course).

Snippet:

Mac played his memories back, focusing on the details he could remember.  The faces of the mourners, their shoes, the pallbearers, the covered dirt mound near the gravesite, the mechanism that held the casket and then lowered it into the ground. 

While Mac and Bozer had wanted to be pallbearers, the honor guard team had insisted on handling that themselves.  It was unusual, but Mac didn't question it at the time because Riley had walked up and taken his hand, squeezing it with an intensity that he wasn't expecting.  She was struggling with Jack's death.  They all were, in their own ways.  It was hard, nearly impossible, to accept.

The water ran cold.  Mac shut it off, toweled himself dry, and dressed in regular clothes.  His dress uniform was hanging on the inside of the closet door, waiting to be dry-cleaned and put away in the back of the closet again.  He brushed his fingers over the rough material, remembering putting it on and going to the funeral home. 

He'd argued with the honor guard team about seeing Jack's body but was ultimately denied that privilege.  Fuming, he'd stood to the side and watched the casket being loaded into the hearse for the simple graveside service that Jack had requested in his will.  The hearse jostled but didn't dip as far as Mac would have expected for someone of Jack's size.  Mentally, he calculated the height of the car pre-casket and post-casket and the weight of the casket and determined that...

"The casket is empty!"

~~

Grave Danger Fusion is two ideas that I'm trying to decide between, so I haven't done much actual work on them. Either Mac gets buried alive or Jack does... Here are my (very sparse) notes:

Mac: Mason kidnaps Mac and buries him alive a la Grave Danger.  He lures Jack into a trap (accidentally, instead of James) and blows himself up so that they'll never find Mac.  They find Mac anyway of course.

Jack: (this one is even less thought out, lol) Jack is Nick and Mac is Grissom (maybe) and Riley is Sara (maybe). Matty might be Grissom.. hmm.. will have to rewatch... but Bozer is definitely Greg.

[cassynite]

WIP Wednesday

Me: I don't do emotion super well, I can't present it in a very empathetic way

My brain, with a gun: write Daeran at his mom's funeral. Do it.

--

Mother's funeral has black roses.

They fill the chapel of Iomadae in Kenabres with a sickly-sweet scent, as if trying to imitate Mother's favorite perfume. They bloom under the light streaming in through the stained glass--it's a beautiful, sunny day outside, the kind that would have Daeran traipsing through the gardens or riding his pony. But the grounds are blocked off now, and his pony is dead, along with every other living thing that had been in Heaven's Edge two weeks ago.

The roses would have been what she wanted. At least, that's what everyone says, when they come up to Daeran to commiserate, these adults in their best mourning garb who he's never, not once, met. They all say the same things--rows and rows of people finding him in the main hall before the funeral procession, sailing over to tell him what a wonderful person she was, how kind and noble and gentle and good. Shoving their memory of her, no matter how vague or unwanted, in his face.

None of them talk about how she snorted when she laughed, or hummed when she was concentrating on work, or threw her arms open when she introduced herself at parties as if she wanted to give the entire crowd a hug. None of them knew her songs or her jokes or that she'd decided to save their worthless lives rather than try to get a healer for herself.

Daeran wants, desperately, to not be an aasimar for a single day, so that his hair doesn't reflect the light shining through the stained glass, so that he is not so easy to find in a crowd. He wants, for a moment, to close his eyes and not exist. The gazes of the crowd, hungry to see his reaction, scrape across his body and leave him raw.

It doesn't help that they're not the only eyes he has to deal with. The thing crouched in his head, the thing that he allowed in and saved his life, never leaves him alone. He'd thought that 'being a doorway' meant he'd occasionally have to deal with whatever [spirit nonsense] it needed to enact from time to time, not that he'd have a permanent passenger inside his skull, whispering caustic thoughts from inside his ears, emitting cold and alien pulses of power, threatening his life should he even speak a word of it as if he did not know what he had agreed to when he first made the pact.

And, always, watching. Constant, ceaseless attention--Daeran is the star of a play for one hideous, malevolent audience, and he never gets curtain call. And him breaking down over staring at his mother's coffin, where her desiccated corpse lies inside to be buried beneath the soil, is not something he'll give it or anyone else in the crowd of sycophants.

He nods and thanks each and every mourner--at least they don't expect him to smile--and then takes his place at the front of the chapel, where the clerics had directed the family to sit.

He's the only one in the row. Everyone else had been at his party, celebrating his birthday, choking on poisoned cake or having their heads ripped off by the slithering pustule from another dimension that now grows on his brain.

Then, right before the high priest in his enormous hat (not Nestrin, Nestrin is never going to lead hours-long sermons ever again) walks up the dais to start the funeral proceedings, there's a murmur in the crowd, and someone places a hand on his shoulder. It's gentle--he'd almost call it hesitant but the pressure is firm and steadying.

He looks over to see the pained smile of a woman out of armor, her hair pulled up and away from her ageless face. The only sign of her years are her eyes, deep pits of blue filled with heavy grief.

"Hello," the queen of Mendev whispers. "Do you mind if I sit next to you?"

Daeran doesn't say anything, and after a moment Queen Galfrey lowers herself to his side in the pew. She's close enough to touch, strangely real and human in a stiff black mourning dress. She stares straight ahead, either ignorant of or blithely unconcerned by the whispers and the attention her presence garners: the queen of Mendev, sitting in the family row, next to the last member of house Arendae.

He's seen her before, of course. He's even met her. At the yearly jubilee in Nerosyan, she'd always make a point to spend at least some time with the Arendaes, and she would attend parties every now and then. Mother always--

Mother would--

The priest begins the ceremony. He speaks of loss and grace and pain in a monotone drawl, one that fills the room with even, continuous sound. The words all blur together, and Daeran stares at a spot beyond the priest's shoulder, where sunlight streams in through the stained glass depicting Iomadae rising from her test of the Starstone. The droning suffocates any life in the room, leaches out the feeling in his body, making everything float away, distant. He's counting the seconds until it is over. He is trying not to poke at the Thing in His Head, rotten and slightly painful like a bad tooth. 

"She'd probably make a joke right now," Queen Galfrey murmurs. Daeran almost jerks at the noise, the sudden intrusion against the ever-present hum of the priest's sermon. "The high ceremonial garb always looks a little silly, doesn't it? She'd probably wonder what the fuss is about."

Daeran keeps his attention on the window, but now there is another person in the room, the queen suddenly distinct from the mass of attention around him.  The queen breathes, louder than usual but still only just enough that Daeran can hear it. It shakes with every exhale.

"I know this won't mean much," she says, still in undertone. No one notices the conversation, how she's talking under the rites of ceremony, sending his mother's soul to Pharasma. "Losing everything like this...nothing will mean much for a while. The loneliness is--I understand. So please believe me when I say it's not the end, either."

She places her hand on top of his, another shock of sensation. Her hand is warm, and dry, rough with callouses. "Your mother was..." She stops, as if she understands she can't fit her into words. Her next words are choked out. "She will be missed."

Everything blurs out of focus: the chapel, the monotone voice, the eyes and the whispers. His lungs are too big for his body, his throat too small, and Daeran stays very, very still, because if he moves even a little bit he is going to splinter into a thousand pieces, and there's no one left to pick up after him now. The only thing anchoring him is the warm hand holding his. As everything else waters away and spins out of control, it remains real and present, holding him to this moment. He tries to find the strength to return the grasp, but even moving his hand is too much.

The queen doesn't seem to expect any kind of response. They stay like that, frozen in small and far away except for where their hands connect, the only thing that is real in this entire day, from this entire nightmare.

"I am here, if you ever need anything. You still have your cousin." The hand squeezes his. "I am so, so sorry."

[thegreatobsesso]

OK HERE WE GO!

✨ WIP intro

🔖 tag list: @winterandwords // @foxboyclit //@revenantlore

@space-writes // @indecentpause // @words-after-midnight

comment to be added or removed!

📝 all posts from WIP: gay crime bdsm story

--

You truly couldn’t get a lovelier day for a funeral. Hopefully his own will be just like this, someday far away - sun shining, birds singing, bumblebees bumbling as they are wont to do. 

Mind, Octavius would never confine his mourners to a graveyard with an old man in black linens droning on about the kingdom of heaven.

No, he’d put them in a huge luxury speedboat, send them rocketing down the Thames and emptying his ashes along the way. Or he’d erect a carnival in Trafalgar Square where every clown would don one his finest suits. Either way, it’d be a joyful occasion. Diamonds in champagne flutes. Seventy-six bloody trombones.

“To you, O Lord, we commend the soul of Edison Augustus Craine,” continues the ancient, dusty priest. “In the sight of this world he is now dead, but in your sight may he live forever. In your goodness, grant him everlasting peace, and forgive the sins he committed through human weakness.”

Now, that was funny. Eddie Craine had enough sins under his belt to humble the devil, but he doubted any were committed through human weakness. Calculated displays of strength, more like, or simply unflinching necessity.

But that was just as well; everlasting peace sounded drearier than these proceedings, if such a thing were possible. 

A chorus of muttered amens appears to signal the end, and judging by the actions of his predecessors, he's meant to approach the coffin where it lies in the center of the absurdly ornate mausoleum and, for some reason, lay his hand upon it.

Strange rituals meant to comfort, he supposes, and so he follows: Leo, Aster, and then himself. 

Aster precedes him in this only because Eddie was her uncle by blood. It usually goes Eddie, Leo, and then Octavius. And for an organization of such sweeping breadth and power, being third suits him just fine, thank you very much.

Being second - assuming it'll play out that way, and he can't conjure a reason why it wouldn’t - will be a change of pace. Perhaps even the sweet spot.

Number one sounds nightmarish, if you ask him. Too many responsibilities, and a man needs time to play.

--

😍

I flew out of bed this morning because Octavius was talking. TALKING! My biggest thing about doing this in prose was that I don't hear him. I could be in Milo's head because he's a nice normal sweet guy but Octavius, I didn't necessarily even want to try to get in his head because the allure of him is in the presentation, the sparkle on the surface, if that makes ANY sense.

But HE'S TALKING TO ME NOW. :D And his voice is... aww, it's a fun voice, and hell, I'm gonna clean this bit up, and I'm gonna post it. 😍

[hjbender]

WIP Wednesday

Last October I started a Gundam Wing horror fic which I planned to debut at Halloween. Halloween came and went. I then decided to turn it into a horror-at-Christmas story. Christmas came and went. Now I’m certainly planning on completing and posting it in time for Halloween this year or go insane trying.

Here’s a snippet of that story, which is still untitled. The synopsis? Heero Yuy dies. But then he doesn’t. Yes, it’s the attack of the Wing Zero Zombie, and he has unfinished business.

He would be buried.

Duo insisted upon it, even in his grief-stricken state. There would be a funeral, a coffin, a headstone, everything, just like they used to do in the old days. None of that cheap bake-blast-and-bonvoyage like they did on the colonies. Heero’s memory deserved better than that.

Quatre tried, in his sensitive and gentle way, to explain to Duo that this wasn’t really necessary, that Heero would have probably preferred cremation to interment. His suggestions were answered with acidic remarks about which of them knew Heero better—a remote friend, or his roommate for the past ten years?

Quatre understood Duo’s quips for what they were and changed his tactic, offering as much solace and support as he could. It wasn’t Duo’s fault that Heero had been so tentative about their relationship. It wasn’t his fault that Quatre and Trowa had been happily married for the past eleven years and devoted their time to fostering children and rehabilitating abused animals. It wasn’t his fault that all Quatre’s dreams had come true while he and Heero were still trapped on the same rollercoaster they’d been riding since 197. It wasn’t his fault that the shuttle experienced a critical hull failure and depressurized four minutes after leaving Earth’s orbit on the seventh of October, A.C. 208. It wasn’t his fault that Heero—immortal, inimitable Heero, who had cheated death and beat the Zero system and become a living legend at eighteen—had died in the cold vacuum of space, on his way home with a black velvet box in his pocket and a question in his heart only Duo could answer.

It wasn’t his fault. For once, it wasn’t his fault.

It had been Relena’s idea to lay Heero to rest in the Cinq Kingdom Royal Cemetery, that lovely green knoll overlooking the western sea, among the stones of the Peacecraft family. Duo had agreed and thanked Foreign Minister Lemaire (née Darlian) for her generosity. They had been able to speak to one another on the vid phone well enough, but when they saw each other on the day of the funeral, they both began to weep and didn’t stop until the day after the burial.

“Any time you want to see him”—visit his grave, thought Duo, because he’s dead and there’s nothing to see—“you are welcome to stay with Michel and me,” she said.

So Heero got his coffin and his headstone and his large, stately funeral, the president of ESUN delivered a heart-touching speech beforehand, tears were wept, a hymn was sung, and Heero Yuy was buried beneath six feet of dirt with the black velvet box in his cold, stiff hand. The mourners parted ways and returned to their homes, their jobs, the ebb and flow of their existences, minus one.

Heero slept in the ground, in the dark and damp, his white silk suit growing black patches of mildew. The formaldehyde in his arteries had gone hard; his eyelashes remained long and pretty even with his eyelids glued closed; his jaws were surgically wired shut; his organs, thoroughly reamed of their contents and infused with embalming fluid, lay heavily in his body like sacks of mud, awaiting their eventual decomposition.

Twenty-eight years old. Surrounded by soft satin pillows and tender notes written by his closest friends. A teddy bear at his right shoulder, a lily—now wilted and brown—on his chest. And all around him, the sound of nothing.

There is no quieter place in the world than what lies on the other side of a coffin lid. Not even the absolute silence of outer space can compare to the stillness, the ultimate finality, of an oblong box in the bosom of the Earth. Capsules might become caskets to those unlucky travelers of the stars, but space is a poor substitute for soil, which muffles the sounds of the living world above and blacks out all light, allowing the dead to sleep undisturbed.

But every now and then, a coffin becomes the instrument of the most horrific note in all the world.

The scream of the undead.

[specterpeach]

Fanfic Tag Game

Tagged by @ice-tiger-kitten~ Thank you for tagging me! ♡

Your First Fic:

A Cowboy Bebop Spike x Faye fic published Aug 13th of 2003. It’s complete and has 37k+ words. It basically picked up where the series left off. Like what if Spike was okay and Faye and Jet came to save him? It’s...alright, but I’ve definitely improved as a writer. I feel it necessary to mention I wrote far shittier fics prior to this as a teenager for comic book series. Never published anywhere online thank the gods. I don’t even know if I have copies of them anymore.

Your Most Recent Fic:

Cafe Latte! Which I’m sure most of you are somewhat aware of whether you like it or not... 

Your All Time Favorite Fic:

I don’t really have one tbh. But if I had to choose I would say either my Ky lux oneshot called “A Proposition” (yeah, it’s exactly what you’re thinking) or my Hannigram long fic I’m still working on “Intimate Instincts”. It has many of the morally questionable elements I love Hannibal for. That one is a super “mind the tags” deal. 

Your Most Challenging Fic:

The one I’ve basically abandoned from a previous fandom. *hint* it deals with personified countries I loved writing that damn fic...had so much steam to keep going even with the scant feedback...then I got stuck. Like total dead end stuck. Waited months and no ideas came. With the waning of the fandom I just kinda gave up. I’m not gonna go as far as to say I’ll never finish it, but I’m not really interested in it anymore. 

Your Most Self-Indulgent Fic:

Both my current WIPs are indulgent af, but Cafe Latte takes the cake. Self-indulgence is pretty much all that fic is.

Your Favorite Line you ever wrote:

“The morning of Han Solo’s funeral dawned clear and bright as if the heavens themselves were honoring the requiem of such a resplendent soul. The viewing was held early and many mourners arrived to pay their respects prior to the burial service. It dragged on for a couple hours and Ben could barely keep his eyes open from his position seated comfortably on a random couch. He had already seen his father, reposed stiffly in his coffin, surrounded by silk lining and trinkets from a life well-lived.”

I opted for my fave paragraph. This is from a Ky lux fic that was a Six Feet Under AU. I worked my ass off writing the first chapter then promptly lost interest in it after it was done. Besides doing a parallel of the show I had no idea where to go with it and was not willing to do 6 seasons worth of freakin’ parallels even trimmed down.  

Your Current WIPs:

Most of my works are WIPs at this point. I’ve pretty much given up on like 3 of them (one bitterly). But as far as current ones go just “Cafe Latte” and “Intimate Instincts”. *sings these are the fics that never end* 

But! My two active WIPs right now have plots for a change! Hopefully this will help me actually finish them lol

Next Fics?

My Urban Witch / Pagan Ota yuri AU! I’m super stoked about this one because I’ve been a pagan for like 15 years and I want to share that world with everyone. It’s going to take a lot of research though, and the storyline is fighting me. If anyone wants to help me brainstorm I’d appreciate it!

Also watching American Gods has me rethinking everything. This is awful because I would have to rework the whole damn plot plus figure out “who the fuck could be which god and or supernatural entity??” testing the fragile limits of my mythological knowledge base. So this troublesome AU is pulling me in two directions. :’)

but jfc an american gods au asldfkdsjfkdlsgkladsjklf so much of the yoi cast could be included aaaaaaaaAAAA

Tagging: @phaytesworld, @theinsanefox, @francowitch, @aphhun, @zeldaismyhomegirl, @blownwish-blog, @jubesy