#i love these so much i wrote 1400 words tonight just to have new stuff for 'first' and 'deep'

[dangerous-disposition]

WIP wordsearch game!

rules: share snippets of your work containing each of the words the previous poster selected for you (optional addition: if you can't find the word in your WIPs, or you simply don't have any WIPs, you can just write a sentence around the word)

tagged by the bestest @scarcrossdlvrs

All of my snippets are gonna be coming from my modern AU stuff which I've shared a lot of already but WHATEVER i typically can't have several projects running at the same time lmao

First

In a bunk bed on a tour bus on the other side of the country, Eddie Munson stared at the phone in his hand with a little smile tugging at his mouth.

It was a short conversation but there was something really nice about having a conversation with someone who treated him like a normal human being. It had been years since Eddie could talk to someone other than his band mates, manager, and uncle without it being either drenched in starstruck hero-worship or stilted professionalism.

At first, that had been exciting. They finally made it. After all of their hard work and grinding and sleepless, penniless weeks of driving themselves to gigs, they did it. Eddie wasn’t the local drug dealing deadbeat loser every high school teacher believed he would be forever. He was somebody, and people either worshiped him or at least respected him.

He just never expected stardom to become so lonely.

Blank

Sitting back down at his desk, Steve pulled up the details for the block and opened the rooming list the tour manager sent.

He was startled, but appreciative of the fact that the riders were included in the same document, even if that meant that the rooming list was given to him in the worst possible format. A goddamn PDF.

Grumbling to himself, Steve did what he did best; tucked himself in to read the contract from top to bottom, then back again, then did the same with the riders. Then came all the technical stuff of building the room block, then struggling through getting the names off the PDF and into a spreadsheet to book the rooms.

“They could’ve sent this when it was still a Word document but no,” Steve grumbled bitchily, shoving his glasses back up his nose. “They had to be all fancy and important and send it as a fucking PDF.”

Finally, when that was all done and the rooms were confirmed, Steve pulled up a blank email and the tour manager’s contact details in their system.

The manager’s name was Chris Cunningham, according to the information the above-property sales manager input, and something about that name did sound familiar. Steve couldn’t place it right away, so he gave up trying and went back to starting his email.

Under

Steve sat at his desk typing up an email to one of the event managers’ clients, quietly grumbling to himself about why he had to email them without any real heat. The managers were busy, and sometimes it just made more sense for Steve to email them outright. He would do it, he would just bitch about it while he did it.

“Steve.”

Looking up, he met Joyce’s eyes and cringed under her stern face.

“Yes, Joyce?” he asked, but he already knew what this was about.

“I was looking through the turnovers. Did Nancy give you a group the other day?” she asked and Steve looked at his computer.

“It’s just a band and film crew. I’ve already made contact with the client,” Steve said, his ears heating up when Joyce sighed.

“I’d like to speak to you in my office, please,” she said and walked away.

Sighing heavily, Steve finished the email he was working on, sent it, and locked his computer. When he got up and turned, Nancy was hovering at her cubicle and chewing her lip.

“Sorry,” she mouthed and Steve just rolled his eyes and trudged across the room to Joyce’s office and shut the door.

Lips

“Nancy seems to think that if she turned it over properly and asked for you to assign it to me, you would assign it to one of the other managers,” Steve said with a knowing raise of his eyebrows when Joyce looked away and cleared her throat. “C’mon, she has a point, Joyce.”

“That’s because if I agreed to assign every group she wants given to you, you would be back in the same mess as you were last summer,” Joyce said a bit defensively. “Tell me about the group, and I’ll decide if you can keep it.”

“I already made contact with the client!” Steve said.

“And you were not actually assigned this group properly. If I decide I want to take the group from you and reassign it, that is my decision to make as Director of Events,” Joyce said, standing her ground.

Steve sat up straighter and narrowed his eyes. “You would undermine your team like that in the eyes of the client?” he asked and Joyce pursed her lips.

“And Nancy didn’t undermine me by going over me to assign you a group?” she challenged and Steve sighed heavily.

Deep

“Whatever, the point is Chrissy knows I always have her phone when she can’t find it. Her freaking out is just silly,” Eddie said with a sniff, glaring down at the Sudoku puzzle he was making zero progress with.

“Edward Munson!”

Jeff peered over the edge of his bunk to smirk at Eddie’s wide-eyed stare. “Uh oh,” he teased as Chrissy stormed into the room.

“You!” she practically shrieked, pointing at him as he shoved the phone between his body and the mattress as if she hadn’t already seen it in his hands.

“What?” he asked innocently, and he screamed as she dove into his bunk to wrestle the phone out from under him.

They tussled for a while, Chrissy yelling all sorts of expletives at him that were honestly still a shock coming from her sweet face. She was also a dirty fighter.

“Ow, shit! Did you just bite me?” Eddie hissed, grabbing Chrissy’s whole face and pushing her away as he looked at the distinctly teeth-shaped indents on his arm. They were deep, just barely not breaking skin and would definitely bruise.

Then Chrissy licked his palm like an animal, and he recoiled enough that he rolled off of her phone.

Okay! Now my no pressure tags: @pizzaqueen, @patchworkgargoyle, @scoops-stevie, @steddieas-shegoes, @afewproblems

And your words are: wish, falter, teeth, little, breath

[thehouseofgrey]

“One of the highest praises we’ve heard about this book, over and over, is how realistic the sibling interactions are. I know you said you grew up as an only child, so how did you capture the essence of life as a sibling in your new book?”

Magnus smiled at the interviewer and the audience beyond the cameras, finding Alec beaming back at him through the crowd. “My partner has siblings. I watched them interact, how they greet each other, embrace each other, speak to one another, as well as how they talk about each other when you get them alone. And what I found was no matter where you fall on the birth order, there’s this sort of fond exasperation that comes with having siblings. I love you, and I kinda want to hit you over the head with this plastic sword, but if anyone else tries to hit you with a plastic sword, I’m going to hit them in the face with a very big rock.”

He was quoting directly from a story his boyfriend had told him several months ago when he was in the editing stages and the editor's notes only said, “make them more like real siblings.”

“Make them more like real siblings?” He looked at Alec in frustration. “That’s the least helpful editing note I’ve ever received.”

Alec laughed at him. “She’s right though. I’ve read your manuscript. They sound like aliens pretending to be siblings. They don’t actually sound like they’ve ever met in their life, let alone lived together for all of it.”

Magnus sighed and threw the notes and the copy of his book he was editing down on the table. “What I’m saying is, there are no suggestions of things to make them seem more like siblings. Just telling me it’s bad doesn’t help me fix it.”

“Come to dinner with me on Friday,” Alec said in lieu of an answer.

“I thought Friday nights were family dinner at your mom’s.”

“They are,” he agreed. “Come. Everyone will be there.”

“Why would I come to the Lightwood family dinner, Alexander?”

“To observe.”

It had been the greatest gift Magnus had ever received. This chance to observe, in close quarters, a natural interaction between real siblings. They made a habit of it. Every Friday, Magnus came to dinner. He learned more about family in two months than he had ever known. When he sent the manuscript back to his editor, she was thrilled. “Now they sound like siblings.”

Alec was a different man around his siblings. Magnus expected his boyfriend to be the same affectionate but no nonsense person who ran his own start-up business. But that was not who Alec was at all on Friday nights. He was truly the big brother everyone wished they had.

“Hey dork,” he said to Max that first Friday evening, leaning against the doorframe of the boy’s room.

“I’m not a dork,” Max insisted even though he was visibly putting back together a computer he had taken apart.

“Yes you are,” Alec chuckled. “And mom wants to talk to you. She’s in the kitchen.”

Max sighed and rolled his eyes but he got up from his desk and gone, shouting “don’t touch any of the stuff on my desk” over his shoulder.

“So these characters are based on real people?” The interviewer asked.

“All the best characters are,” Magnus answered. “At least in part. But, if you’re asking if I based these characters interactions on my partner and his siblings, the answer is yes. Some of them I even lifted wholesale, changing little scenes in the book to match the dialogue. Just to get the authenticity.”

Once, after Izzy missed a brunch with them, Alec had taken Magnus straight to her apartment, pulling a spare key from beneath the potted plant by the door and letting them in. The apartment was dark, but there were clothes strewn all over the floor on their way back to Izzy’s room.

Alec opened the door with no hesitation, Magnus’ bid for her privacy dying on his lips. Izzy was lying in her bed, Clary on one side of her and Maia on the other. Magnus looked away but Alec just looked smug.

“Hey, Iz.”

She sat bolt upright, looking both alarmed and embarrassed. “Get out of my room!”

She threw a pillow at him which he caught easily.

“You didn’t show to brunch. I had to come check on you. Mom would kill me if something bad happened to you.” Then, almost as if it were an afterthought, “And I would miss you or whatever.”

The nonchalance has stuck with Magnus. Alec didn’t care what his sister was doing in her own apartment. He didn’t care that she was naked. He even pretended he didn’t care what happened to her, claiming his mother’s concern and not his own. But Magnus knew his boyfriend. He had seen the worry when she didn’t show and the relief when he saw her in bed. “And I would miss you or whatever” didn’t cover any of that. But there was Alexander with an easy trouble-maker smile, no trace of his earlier panic on him. Like he had just come over to ruin her late morning wake-up sex.

Another time they had gone to the gym where Jace worked as a physical trainer, after some bet between Magnus and Alec about who could bench press more.

“Who are you?” Jace greeted them.

Alec met his joke with a playful punch to the shoulder. “The guy who’s about to win this bet and choose where we’re going to dinner tonight.”

Jace laughed. “I don’t know, Alec; Magnus looks like he could take you.”

“Smart boy,” Magnus agreed.

Magnus had discovered it was common practice for the older siblings to gang up on the youngest. But, Max seemed unbothered by this.

“What’s up, buttholes?” He greeted them when coming to the table.

“Shut up, loser,” Jace replied.

Or another Friday:

“Hey nerd,” Izzy said from that same spot in the doorway where Alec had stood that first night.

“What do you want?” He snarked.

“Fine, I guess we’ll let Magnus eat all your pizza.”

Max lit up and pushed past them in his scramble to get to the dining table.

But it was just as common, Magnus found for them to namecall each other.

Sup bitch.” Alec said when Izzy answered the door.

“Fuck off.”

They entered the house to Max playing video games with Jace on the couch.

“Hey, shithead,” Alec said to his brother like it was a term of endearment.

Without looking up from his game or changing his tone at all, Max responded, “Hey dickface.”

Alec nodded at Jace who at least had the decency to glance their way. “Whaddup, slut?”

Jace just laughed and got back to mashing buttons and killing random baddies on his half of the split screen. “Eat my ass, little brother. I crushed you!”

That was the only time Magnus had heard any of them refer to any other as “brother” or “sister” and it was clearly meant to be a taunt.

The oddest of all was when they all stayed the night at Alec’s loft one night. Alec stood in the doorway of the living room and stared at his siblings who were watching a movie until Izzy noticed him. The silent staring continued for at least fifteen seconds, now mutual, before Jace finally broke it.

“What?”

“What do you guys want for dinner?”

“Bitch…” Izzy scoffed.

Alec left and ordered Chinese, somehow knowing exactly what they all wanted without asking them.

“I had a surprisingly easy time coming up with convincing dialogue for the scenes I couldn’t change,” Magnus continued to tell the interviewer, “once I had spent a couple months observing what it was like to have siblings. It was perhaps the most fun I have ever had researching for a novel. I recommend every only child spend as much time as they can around their friends with siblings, because it’s truly delightful to witness.”

“Well there you have it, ladies and gentlemen,” the interviewer said in conclusion. “Unfortunately we are out of time but you can buy Magnus Bane’s newest book…”

The rest of the promotion was drowned out by uproarious applause and Magnus had the feeling this one would be another best seller. And he had no one but Alexander to thank for that.

——

@kinkymagnus : ask and ye shall receive. Have 1400 words of... whatever this is. This thing I wrote at 3a instead of sleeping.

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