WIP Wednesday
Tagged by @greypetrel--thank you for thinking of me, friend! I've got a few things banked that I don't think I've shared yet c:
(Tagging, in turn, @vakarians-babe @cullenvhenan @ndostairlyrium @dungeons-and-dragon-age @brother-genitivi @heniareth @zenstrike @palipunk @daggerbean @jtownnn, if any of you would like to share something!)
Here is a sweet snippet from that Act 2 piece I've been talking about. This particular chapter lines up with parts of Palimpsest, if you've read it, and makes sense enough on its own if you haven't:
Fenris’s eyes found hers unerringly the moment he stepped through the doorway. There was something on his face—something intense, vital, having nothing to do with anger or regret. The sight of it jolted her, and though she’d been playing the tipsy fool for nearly half an hour now she almost gave up the act at once to ask him what he meant by it.
He swung a leg over the bench and sat beside her, just as he had for years now, but something new hummed in the empty space between them. She could hear it under the conversation and laughter of her friends, feel it in the moments when her sleeve brushed against his shoulder, see it when she glanced his way and the corner of his mouth rose in a faint but noticeable smile.
What was this?
Maria didn’t know. It made her giddy, brought a flush to her cheeks. She was grateful for the latter, for it made her performance of drunkenness even more convincing, but it also felt…it was too much. She’d felt only echoes before, the flutter in her chest when he gestured in that elegant way he had, the heat in her ears that she batted aside whenever she watched him execute an especially graceful or brutal maneuver during a fight. She knew how she felt about him; she could list a dozen reasons that she shouldn’t feel them (foremost amongst them that he couldn’t be comfortable with that sort of attention) and a hundred reasons why she couldn’t help herself regardless. She hadn’t spent the last three years debating herself for and against it for nothing, for the Maker’s sake, but this—
When they all stepped out into the night air, she was relieved. It cooled some of the flush on her cheeks, though not soon enough to hide it from the others.
“D’you feel a fever coming on, Hawke?” Merrill asked from Isabela’s back, her eyes glassy with too much drink. Even so, she lifted cool hands and patted Maria’s face carefully, feeling her forehead and cheeks in turn. “I’ve a draught for it in my room if you’re getting sick.”
“I’m fine,” Hawke assured her, reaching up to hug her one-armed, “just a bit too much to drink.”
Merrill hummed in acknowledgement and snuggled her head back into Isabela’s shoulder. Isabela eyed Hawke for a moment before lifting an arm for Maria to tuck herself under.
“Watch yourself, sweet thing,” Isabela murmured into her ear, “that one bites.”
“Nothing to watch,” Hawke murmured back, and pulled away. “Make sure she has water. She always forgets.”
“No, I don’t,” Merrill murmured, but Isabela smiled broadly.
“Sure there isn’t,” she said, “we’ll see about that, Hawke. C’mon, kitten. Let’s get you home.”
Hawke smiled after them, shaking her head, and when she turned she found Fenris waiting, eyes fixed on her.
The way he watched her sometimes…it had been wary at first, she was certain. Over the years, it had been replaced with mild exasperation, sometimes laughter, occasionally tentative affection. Now, there was something else in his eyes, some unnameable focus that set her heart to racing again the moment it’d finally calmed.
“Ready?” she asked Fenris.
The moon loved the sight of him, she’d often thought. Its light was like silver-gilt on the planes of his face when he angled his head to the side and it tangled in the strands of his hair with the gentlest of brushstrokes.
Who do I think I am, Varric? she wondered, looking toward the stairs home. Maybe I drank too much, after all.
She knew better, of course, but it was a convenient enough excuse to seize upon.
“I am,” Fenris said, and together they started up the stairs home.
Later, she wouldn’t remember much about the conversation that followed. He’d told her not to apologize to him—that much she held onto—but everything else was washed away by the way he’d reached out and taken her hand in his. His fingers were calloused and warm, bounded on every side by cool metal that occasionally snagged on her robes. While they finished climbing the steps to Hightown, Hawke wished fervently that she lived a little further away—somewhere outside of town, perhaps, so this walk could go on forever and she’d never have to let go. But of course the stairs home were as they’d always been, the walk as long or short as ever, and when they paused before her doorway they said goodbye in their usual manner.
For the first time, as she pressed her cheek to his breastplate and wrapped her arms around him, Hawke wished that she could hear the thud of his heart through his armor. Was his racing as much as hers? Had the touch been a whim or did it mean something more? Her mind buzzed with it, hummed with the way he tentatively wrapped his arms around her in return, the whisper of his breath against the loose curls along the edge of her braid. This was—something new. She was almost certain of it.
And yet, even then, the tiniest sliver of doubt held her from asking him what he wanted. It was not an unkind little voice. It was sympathetic—sorrowful, even, and its words were only logical.
You’re not ready, it whispered when she would have held on to him more tightly. After a moment, it added: He’s not ready.
So, flushed and weak-kneed, Hawke bade him goodnight as if nothing had changed at all. She was fortunate, she supposed, that she’d been keeping her feelings tucked neatly away this long. It had been necessary practice for this—whatever this was.
When she climbed into her bed some time later, it felt almost unbearably cold, too large for her by far, and she huddled on the edge of the mattress trying to will herself to sleep.
What would it feel like to—
No. He was her friend. It was enough; more than enough, after everything they’d seen.
But when he’d held her hand, he’d been gentle and firm. If he touched her somewhere else, what would it—
No.
She had no idea what she was doing. She had very little experience with any of this, and having a crush on one’s friend was a different creature entirely than deciding to pursue these feelings. No. Until she could…figure this out, she’d leave it to Fenris.
Hawke rolled over until her face was buried in the pillow. She groaned long and loud, and when she was finally done she closed her eyes and tried to sleep.
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how many wips you currently got?
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A lot…? Most of them are random notes in badly filed documents though.
I guess the ones I’ve been actively working on this month…
And They Were Zoom-mates… silly modern AU that got completely out of control. 225k series for some reason. One chapter left when my brain applies itself to editing.
Purgatory - early canon divergence. Back from mini-hiatus. Currently at chapter 39. Hoping to finish by chapter 50… bit I’m side eyeing that projection.
Tio-verse multi-chapter - unpublished WIP. Projecting ~10 chapters and approximately 50% complete.
Dark Alternative - Dark magic AU. Rayllum childhood friends to lovers. ~20+ chapters (projected, likely more) Currently 50k WIP doc
Out Of Time sequel - God… like… I wanna but I don’t. They were finally happy in that ‘verse. And yet… Six uber sad chapters. Currently 10k written. I can tell it wouldn’t take much to finish but the guilts get me.
Snake Boi Callum fic - failing to adhere to a 500 word limit to the prompts so ~4K at present. Aiming to publish for that event.
Bloodythirsty follow up - no idea why, but liked this AU and wanted more. Probably half done. Have in my head to post for Halloween. Maybe an M/E rated additional chapter because vampire are hot.
I have a lot of other half baked ideas (Finnegrin’s Wake from both Rayla and Callum’s POV, one-sided Sorayla fic, super random regency fic) that get picked up every now and then, but the ones above are the ones most likely to see competition/AO3 at all.
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I just realized something about Nile’s eye makeup.
His bey is obviously based on Horus, the Egyptian god. And everything about Nile, legit down to the fact he has the same name as the major river in Egypt, seems to be a reference to his heritage. However his makeup doesn’t really look like Horus’s symbol, the eye of Horus. It doesn’t look like the eye of Ra either in my opinion, it seems both stylized and different from both famous symbols.
Instead, they are deliberately asymmetrical, as if they represent different things. These are supposed to show something. The kid version of me in my head who was obsessed with mythologies told me I was forgetting something that I definitely should know. So I dusted off my old books and did a bit of digging. And...
The deity Horus is a sky deity. And in early texts, his eyes were described as the sun and moon, before they were split up between Horus and Ra later on. More specifically, his right eye was the sun and his left was the moon.
The makeup under Nile’s right eye predominantly features a triangle, like a sun ray. And the makeup under his left features what looks to be a geometric crescent, like the moon.
...His makeup is a nod to the early translations of Horus’s eyes.
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a year and a half of work gone
well i have officially lost all my art files edited and created since july of 2022 as well as all of my favorite brushes and tool settings i've since modified, including the only few lineart brushes i found that actually worked for me
some of my reference and insp photos were salvaged but most all of them are from 2022 and the very beginning of 2023
i've been going through my socials saving as many wip / unfinished previews and old pieces as i can and saving them but there were so many folders within my documents full of pieces i never shared or screencapped that are just. completely gone.
i got maybe 3.5 hours of sleep and have spent most of the morning sobbing because i've realized how much i've lost... it's like i burnt up multiple sketches and totally obliterated all my brushes and pens, cracked paint pans... like a year and a half of acquired tools and hard work is just gone
i guess if anything i can take the time now to redownload and modify as much as i can and remember to and create a double back up system for everything, then make a list of the pieces i don't even have wip screenshots of and decide what's meant to stay lost and what i'll try to recreate?
at least i have some the recent screengrabs of stuff i was working on literally yesterday so i don't have to start completely fresh on them
but yeah otherwise. i have to try and pick up the pieces and start almost completely fresh all over again, only this time not because i wanted to
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