#it’ll be another body in my wip graveyard

[hvly]

void by the neighborhood got my creative gears turning

[spacebeyonce]

another wip wednesday from me. hello.

another bit from chapter two of I WANNA TRUST YOU. this time it’s riku and kairi. this has been turning out more canon compliant than I expected, and I’m not mad at it, ha! I think this is gonna turn out fine. hopefully I’ll have the full chapter out this weekend, but it’ll depend on my mood and energy.

more below the cut, of course.

Consciousness returns to Kairi in slow drips.

The first thing she notices is that she’s warm. That she’s lying on something soft. The familiar scent of detergent rises to meet her and that tells Kairi she’s – at home? She’s home, and she’s curled up in her bed, and –

And behind her there’s a rustle of movement. A soft, quiet sigh.

That’s what Kairi registers next – the warm line of heat from a body tucked against hers, arms wrapped around her waist. Familiar arms. Working to pry her eyes open, Kairi’s muddled brain tries to recall how she got here. Slivers of violet peek out, and Kairi can muzzily see that the room – her room – was pitch black. It must have been late. But how did she get here? She remembers being on the play islands, and….and –

I have to go.

Her eyes snap open.

Everything comes back to her then, in striking, painful detail. The battle. Sora coming to find her. The way he – he just –

Kairi’s breath hitches in her chest. At her back, the warmth moves.

“…Kairi?”

Riku’s voice brushes over the shell of her ear. Soft, cautious. “Are you – are you up?”

Kairi’s lips part silently, but – her voice sticks in her throat. She can’t speak. Doesn’t even know what to say. Eventually, Riku sighs quietly, settling back down. His mouth presses against the curve of her shoulder. “I –”

He breathes in shakily. “You’re probably still sleeping. Kairi…I don’t – I don’t know what happened. He was right there. And then he wasn’t, do – do you know?”

Kairi stays silent, because of course she doesn’t know. How could she? She didn’t know that Sora would – she thought they were done. That they had made it, and they could go home. Not that Sora – he –

“I’m going to find him, Kairi.”

It takes everything in her not to stiffen up as ice floods her veins. Riku squeezes her waist. “I promise.” He swears. “I’ll – I’ll look everywhere. I’ll find him and bring him home.”

Kairi’s heart sinks into her stomach. She fights to keep the relaxed, even breathing of sleep. She didn’t know what she expected. She had thought – she had hoped –

Well. It doesn’t matter in the end what she hoped for. Because the answer is here, lying plainly between them in the dark.

You’d kinda just be in my way.

Kairi bites at the inside of her cheek. Bites and bites at the tender flesh until pain sparks behind her eyelids, bright and sharp.

The battle at the Keyblade Graveyard must have been a test, then – one she failed. Why else would Riku be doing this to her? Making plans and not involving her at all?

Riku murmurs oaths and promises into her skin, and Kairi swallows the hurt, pushes it down, down, down, until it’s a cold stone, sitting in her belly. So much has changed – or at least she thought it has. Kairi hoped things would be different. So why is this the same?

I can’t help?

You’d kind of just be in my way.

Laughing disbelief, excluded like her help isn’t even an option worth considering – shouldn’t this be over now? Shouldn’t she be allowed to search for him, too?

The hurt spikes in Kairi’s chest, stealing her breath. She bites at the inside of her cheek – bites and bites until the urge to cry has passed, until she can breathe again.

Eventually she falls asleep.

When she wakes, Riku is gone.

Kairi isn’t surprised – why should she be, she thinks bitterly, when the message was said loud and clear?

I’m going to find him – I’ll find him and bring him home.

I, I, I – not we, never we. No. No, Kairi was just meant to sit here and be good, was meant to just be content with being left behind to wait.

Kairi didn’t want to wait anymore – she refused to continue waiting. Not when there could be something she could do – anything. Pushing herself up onto her elbows, Kairi wracks her brain, trying to think. Biting her lip, she snatches up her gummiphone from her nightstand.

If Riku was going to go and search the worlds without her, then – fine. Fine. She can at least start searching somewhere else.

“Yes?”

“Ienzo? It’s…it’s Kairi. If it’s possible, could you – can someone – I need to come to Radiant Garden.”

[kaylewiswrites]

Drunk WIP Week Day 3 - The Forgotten Grave Society

For those of you who haven’t heard me yelling about this for the past three days, I’m shrugging off the burden of trying to look like I know what I’m doing, and introducing my WIPs the way I do when I’m drunk and excited. 

If you like assholes, superpowers, camping, and people who almost get along, check out Day 1. 

If you like slow burn lesbian romances, political intrigue, ragtag groups who come to love each other, and deserts, try Day 2. 

If you like empowered middle school girls who start to see dead people, then congrats, you are, temporally, in the right place. 

The Forgotten Grave Society

Premise:

Today is easy. The world building is like, nothing. 

TFGS takes place in a small town in a small state, where life on the seaside brings in tourists, and also, sometimes, ghosts, apparently. (I am really liking excessive commas today, aren’t I?) The story begins in the small town on the mid-Atlantic on the first full day of summer vacation, in a graveyard that is commonly overlooked. 

Characters:

Marcy: Here’s a girl who looks average, not tall or short, tan or pale, large or small, and has not one single physical feature that makes her stand out. Bank robbery is Marcy’s backup career, since so many people overlook her. But her personality makes up for the middle ground that she exudes: All or nothing. 

She’s either trashing her room, or organizing everything by color. She cooks gourmet meals or rips cold rotisserie chicken straight from the fridge with her hand. To her coaches annoyance, she’s unable to figure out jogging. You can’t just sprint and walk, he tells her. But she doesn’t really get it. 

Marcy spends a lot of time in her own head, and it’s very, very easy for her to miss where the conversations around her are going, while she takes a side path down another road, and by the time she brings up something she founds there, everyone else is miles away. She got laughed at a lot because of this, and now rarely talks with all of her track friends. 

Talents include: running, jumping, getting A’s the three times a year she studies, cooking, and being brutally honest without meaning to be brutal. 

Ava: Ava was born the cutest child you had ever seen. Perfect brown ringlets in her hair, cherubic round face and rosy cheeks, innocent freckles underneath her big round eyes, everyone just adored Ava from the moment they saw her. And then she opened her mouth. 

Ava hates having high expectations held over her head, so she’s learned how to dash them as soon as possible. On the first day of first grade, the teacher called on Ava to introduce herself first, (since she would obviously become the teachers favorite, by the look of her). Ava stood up on her chair and gave a loud, scientific description of how babies were made. She’s been a class clown ever since. 

Known talents are: Causing a scene, making fart noises, disrupting the class. She hides the real ones: sculpting and casting, non-fiction reading, getting under Marcy’s skin (ok, maybe she doesn’t hide that last one)

Ronnie: Everyone knows Veronica is going to become some big engineer or bio-chemist or astrophysicist. Her grandmother was the first black professor at the Marine Biology Department that’s housed in their small town,  so she knows she’s got big shoes to fill. 

But the truth is, Ronnie doesn’t know what she wants to do. She hates that question. You know what she likes? Reading. She likes reading her text books and science theory books, and she likes reading cheesy romances, too. She likes conducting complicated experiments, sure, but she gets just as much pleasure out of the simple steps of her skin-care routine. She relishes in routine and anything she breaks down into small rituals she can. Making a sandwich. Programming a robot. All straightforward if do it one step at a time. 

Talents include: almost anything STEM related, designing inventions, choosing cute outfits, memorizing song lyrics, and coming up with really cool club names.

Plot

Its the first day of summer, and three very different girls from different classrooms and different friend groups somehow find themselves in the same graveyard. 

While there, they realize that a lot of these graves are like, really, really old. People aren’t putting flowers out for them like they do for the new ones. The girls decide to remember those graves for them, and thus the club is born. 

They spend the whole summer hanging out in a graveyard, cleaning stones and making bouquets of definitely-not-stolen-from-people’s-yards flowers. But when it’s time to go back to school, they feel themselves being torn apart by clubs, friends, and work. When they meet in the graveyard again to try to figure out what to do about this, they see a ghost. 

Of course ghost-seeing powers would kick in in September and not June, they think, but discovering the supernatural is real IS a good motivator for spending more time with each other. The Forgotten Grave Society decides to be both about sitting around graves eating snacks on warm summer mornings AND solving ghost problems so they can move onto the next life/afterlife/whatever you believe in (this book takes no assumptions into what happens after the ghosts leave). 

A short snippet is under the cut if you’d like to read! I’m always open to questions, comments, and critiques, so don’t be afraid to give your thoughts. I’m tagging @aomory for this post. If anyone would like to be tagged in more Forgotten Grave Society stuff, let me know! The WIP page is here. 

"Do you think they know?" Ava asks after two weeks of remembering. It's early July, hot and hazy, and humid enough at 9 in the morning that all three are planning on battling tourists to take a dip in the ocean later in the day. They remembered a woman that day, Elizabeth Holson, who died in 1931, and now they're eating lunch in front of her grave. The three girls sit with identical bags of salt and vinegar chips (on sale) and fruit cups filled with syrup. “What’s we’re doing, I mean.”

"You're asking if we believe in life after death," Ronnie responds.

"Well, I guess it's implied," Ava shrugs.

"No." Marcy shoves some chips in her mouth.

"Well, that’s decisive," Ava snorts.

"It seems like a natural, human response to death for me," Marcy states. "Think about it. You see someone die, you realize that one day you will too, and you panic. The idea of nonexistence terrifies people. So they say, no, when you die you go to somewhere better, where you're always young and your whole family is there, or all your stuff is there, or you come back to earth as something else. It's either that or admit that you and everything you know is temporary and unimportant to the world as a whole."

"That's logical, I guess," Ronnie admits. "But I like the idea that something comes next."

"Exactly my point."

"We learn about heaven in Sunday School. I'm going to go ahead and believe in that. It sounds the best."

"In science we learn that matter can't be created or destroyed, only changed. Maybe that happens when we die."

"What do you mean?" Marcy asks. "When, like, a flower dies, it's just gone right? It'll break down into nothing." She gestured at the dead flowers still sitting in front of their first grave. What remains of them are shriveled and dark.

"You're right about it breaking down, but not into nothing. It's releasing carbon dioxide into the air, bugs and larvae and fungi are eating it and turning it into energy the same way we do with food, releasing it as waste, which continues to break down further. All the different parts that made it a living flower are separating back into nature. Remember the Periodic Table? Everything in the universe is made up of those elements, and nothing can ever be added or subtracted."

"So a human body does the same thing. If it's not cremated, it breaks down into it's elements," Ava follows. "What does that have to do with an afterlife?"

"You're body breaks down, but your body isn't the thing that goes to heaven, right?"

"No, it's your soul."

"Exactly. So if nothing can be removed or added from the equation, I think we might be reincarnated."

Ava chews on the tiny plastic spoon that came with her fruit cup. "You're assuming that a soul is made of matter."

"Everything else is."

"But then wouldn't we be able to see it? Feel it?"

"The air around us has mass, but we can't see it, and can usually barely feel it."

"Wouldn't it have to be made of some of your elements?" Marcy asks. "Someone would probably have noticed it by now."

"There could be different molecular constructions that we don't have the technology to detect, a new isotope we haven't thought to look for-" She realizes she’s lost them. "Science is growing every day. Sometimes impossible things are just things that haven't been explained yet."

"You've been thinking about this for a while?" Marcy asks.

"No. Not until Ava just asked."

"This is what we get, making friends with the smart girl," Ava laughs. "So. What's your theory's answer to my question? Do you think these people know what we're doing?"

Ronnie thinks for a moment. "I doubt it. That would imply that they are somehow omniscient about anything that is connected to their past lives. Do you guys have any memories of your old graves?"

"That's a weird thought," Ava shudders. "And no."

Marcy shakes her head.

"Which means that people, or most people, disconnect from their old life when they start a new one. Or it means that my theory is wrong," she chuckles.

"So if you two don't think they know, why are you doing this?"

"I don't think it matters if they know or not," Ronnie says.

"It's like when you do someone a favor,” Marcy says before chugging the syrup from her fruit cup. “If it's important that you take credit for it, then you're not doing it for them. You're doing it for you."  

"Wow. Such kind words from the girl that split open Hannah Bover's lip over a boundary dispute."

"Her foot crossed the line, that shot shouldn't have counted-"

"So you elbowed her in the face?"

"I like doing it," Ronnie cuts in, knowing how long Ava could keep Marcy on this track. "It's peaceful, and it makes me happy. Do we need a reason?"

"Maybe we're subconsciously afraid of being forgotten, so we're trying to remember everyone else. I know I want people to say my name after I'm gone. Everyone deserves to continue existing,” Marcy says with a shrug.

"So Ronnie comes for herself. Marcy comes for them."

"Who do you come for?"

Ava wraps her arms around her legs, as if she were cold. "Neither of your theories allow for ghosts."

She avoids their eyes, and looks very un-Ava-like all of a sudden.

"Do you come for ghosts?" Ronnie asks in the most neutral voice she can manage.

"No," she says defensively. "I mean, I-I didn't. I like doing this, and- just- wouldn't it be cool? If they were watching us, from the shadows, appreciating it?"

Ava becomes more and more nervous as the silence stretches on. Finally, Marcy smiles.

"You're assuming that they're all nice."