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Stealing a meme from ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
_bluebells:
Post the first sentence (or three) from every WIP you're currently working on, even if it's very short. Then invite people to ask questions about your WIPs. With any luck, you'll get talking about writing, and the motivation to take that WIP one step closer to completion will appear as if by magic!
This is nowhere near complete.
I'm anal, though, so these are short excerpts rather than first lines. Bear with me...
"Of Mice and Men: Chapter Two: Fish, Ponds and Things of That Sort" (Ryan/Esposito): A crossover with the comic Fables, written foradja999, in which Ryan has an...unusual hidden past.
Long ago, a friend in Fabletown had given him some advice for learning to blend in amongst the Mundanes: "Don't pretend to be who you're supposed to be, be who you're supposed to be."
More specifically, she had suggested he use the new false name that they had given him as often as he could—in his own head whenever possible. It had helped, and after a while when he introduced himself as Arthur LeSouris, even if it hadn't really been the truth, it had stopped feeling like a lie. It was like the old saying that clothes made the man. Over the last seventy years, slipping on a new name and identity had come to feel a bit like slipping on a new suit: uncomfortable at first, but everything fit better once you had a chance to break it in. A name was only ever just a name if you didn't believe it...
As he measured things, Kevin Ryan wasn't someone he pretended to be, and hadn't been for a long time.
"Ecdysis" (Ryan/Esposito): Wing!fic (kinda) that I promisedroachstar ages ago, in which Kevin is hiding something, Jenny is wrong about what it is.
"Is Kevin cheating on me?"
Javier forgave himself the rude silence as he stared at Jenny, but one would think his best friend's fiance could manage a friendly "Hello" first. Not that he and Jenny had ever been particularly friendly. It wasn't that they didn't get along, it was just that neither one of them had ever had much use for the other. They might as well live on completely different planets, except for the single point of overlap in their lives which was Kevin Ryan.
Or so he had thought, anyway. Her question begged clarification.
"Everywhere and His Nasty Parlour Tricks" (Ryan/Esposito): In which Ryan shows his undercover skills, Javier is caught off guard, and apparently "Peppermint" was a real guy...
The thing that was giving Javier the most trouble right now was this. Kevin Ryan wasn't just his partner. Upon being assigned together, they'd slid past partners with shocking speed and into friendship pretty damned easily. No, Kevin Ryan was his friend, his best friend, and had been for a long time. For more than three years they had shared each others' space for most of every workday, and spent a hefty portion of their free time in the others' company as well. Which sounded like he was gushing, but the point was that he had spent enough boring stakeouts and late-hours paperwork crunches with the guy that he figured he knew the big goof pretty well.
But now his brain was stalled, trying to catch up with what his eyes are seeing and figure out how he'd somehow managed to get everything so wrong. Because his reality had taken a hard knock when Montgomery's betrayal was exposed, and his equilibrium still wasn't anywhere near what it could be. And now nothing was right about a world where Ryan was sprawled out casually on the lap of the hugest biker Javier had ever seen, cigarette hanging lax on his lips, playing poker for crumpled bills and tiny bags of meth.
Not Ryan, he reminded himself harshly, scrubbing the confusion from his features before anyone around them could notice. Donovan. Evan Donovan.
"Misdial" (Ryan/Esposito): (aka, the fic I will never actually have the balls to finish...) In which Javier gets drunk and phone-sexes the wrong number, which somehow becomes a thing between him and Kevin. Because it's not gay or even cheating when they're not even the same room with each other...
If someone had told him a month ago that his engagement would come to an end because of another man, he would never have believed it. Not Jenny, not ever. If that same person insinuated that the man in question would be Javier, Ryan probably would have broken their nose where they stood. If, however, Ryan could be held back from murder long enough for this hypothetical someone to say that he would be the one to break faith, with his partner... Honestly, even a month ago, he might have paused for thought. Which, he supposed, just went to prove the point that a whole was often greater than the sum of its parts.
It happened like this.
"Slice of Life: Refraction" (Ryan/Esposito): An AU of an AU based on the Life 'verse story "Reflection". Basically, how things would have gone if Kevin had been infected instead.
Things with Jenny had started to fall apart very early on—only four days after his exposure, when the anemia had become severe enough that it was clear the treatments weren't working. It was at that point they had first been forced to acknowledge what inevitably lie ahead. He wasn't hospitalized until the fever developed, and while it was possible that she might have been there for part of it, during the more lucid moments Kevin couldn't remember seeing her. She did visit a few times after it broke, however, and for a while he held on to the hope that maybe... He managed to fool himself for a while. He would probably never forget the look on her face the day she realized that his uncharacteristic quietness was due to distraction—that the sick, violent thoughts had already begun to invade his mind.
After that, she had stopped coming entirely.
"Fools Rush In" (Ryan/Esposito): A stand-alone entry into the Quis Custodiet 'verse (ie, my 5-0 fic, "'Aloha' Doesn't Mean Goodbye"), crossover with Supernatural. Javier has gone missing under mysterious circumstances. With the case threatening to go cold, Kevin abandons the rules and goes hunting for the truth behind his partner's disappearance.
As he entered the apartment―quietly, so quietly―Kevin Ryan couldn't help but feel like he was sneaking into his own home.
His mother had always told him he had an honest face. Which was a polite way in her terms of saying that he sucked at lying. He'd learned early on that nine times out of ten he was better off not even trying. Which wasn't to say he was entirely hopeless. He had a good devious mind, he just needed an accomplice to distract from the anxiety that inevitably shone through―"like a deer in traffic" one ex had told him. Growing up, that role had normally fallen to one sister or the other. In high school, his best friend Matthew Sullivan had displayed a dazzling talent as a decoy.
In his time with the NYPD, Kevin had had a number of partners, each with varying degrees of suitability to the job they were unwittingly taking on with the assignment. While a few of them had been spectacular, though, none had ever come close to Javier Esposito.
Javier always projected this tough, no-nonsense exterior that even Kevin had taken a few months to see through. It contrasted well with his own dorky and unassuming image. When Kevin ventured a falsehood, no matter how ridiculous, Javier could manage a marvelous deadpan; a face that eloquently read "I'm buying this, why won't you?" With sufficient preparation, the combination was nearly bulletproof, and those talents had been sorely missed in the undertaking Kevin had made earlier that day.
Of course, if Javier had been available for the job, Kevin wouldn't have been stealing case files from the station in the first place.
Hawaii Five-0
"Proof of Life" (Danny/Steve): A 5-0 story set in the Life AU, where zombies, called "post-vitals", have legal rights.
The case that changed everything was a dumped body.
The victim was Caucasian, female, dressed in the torn and filthy remnants of a short, light-colored dress, but the condition of the corpse made age difficult to identify. Her long brown hair was badly tangled, her cheeks hollow, the skin tight and thin-looking as if she'd suffered severe dehydration before her death. It was the wounds that were of the most concern, however. Bite wounds, several of them, small but deep, where flesh had been removed from her forearms, and her lips were damaged as well. From the bite radius and dental imprints, the bites appeared to be human.
Human teethmarks suggested the killer might have been post-vital—or at least IHN infected—a possibility that Steve processed with a vague surprise.
"Synonymy" (Danny/Steve): A 5-0 story using the same rules for werewolves as my Castle fic "Evidence to the Contrary".
It wasn't that Danny had wanted to slug Steve during their first case. He'd had to. He knew a dominance play when he saw one, and he wasn't about to put up with that shit. And without possibly being able to understand what it had meant to Danny, Steve had seemed to be on board, because for all that Steve was the boss, from that point on, for the most part they operated as equals.
Still, he hadn't realized just how screwed he was in until he walked into McGarrett's home one morning, only realizing after the fact that he hadn't bothered to knock.
That wasn't how he behaved with co-workers. That wasn't even how he behaved with most friends. That was a trust thing, a family thing.
A pack thing.
"Abyssus Abyssum Invocat" (Danny/Steve): I tried to jump on the selkie!fic bandwagon after readingwhogeek's story "Family Secrets".
He was hunting for some tool or another in his garage when he stumbled on the box bearing his mother's name. In it were a few of her things he vaguely remembered from childhood, pictures, a favorite ring.
He's not sure what he's found when he finds it, stuffed in the bottom of the box, wrapped in an old sheet long since devoured by moths. He's not sure why his heart jumps when his hand touches it, though it is oddly warm, and slick, and smells of the sea. The sound of the surf carries loudly into the garage, just then. Then Danny calls, and he puts the question away for another day.
Torchwood
"Eventuality" (Rex/Esther, Rex/Jack): Rex is aparently not a popular character amongst old fans of the show. I only got the chance to watch "Children of Earth" before "Miracle Day" started, so I never had that bias...
The thing that bothered him the most was that he wasn't even thinking about Jack when the idea first crossed his mind. He was thinking of Esther. Thinking of how unfair it was that they'd been lying side by side—dying side by side—when the Miracle ended, and yet he'd survived. Thinking of how short a time they'd really had together, even by normal standards. Thinking about how every day that passed pushed him farther away from all of those moments they'd shared. Thinking about how, one day, there would be so much distance between them—so many years, experiences, people—that he might forget they had ever meant anything at all...
Thinking about how much he was beginning to hate those words, "one day", now that it appeared he had so many ahead of him.
One day, its going to seem like a good idea...
Fallout 3
"It's Just the End of the World Again" : The Lone Wanderer undergoes transformation into a ghoul.
He'd been shot, stabbed, clawed, bitten, burned, blasted, stung, and electrocuted. He'd been drugged, and had part of his brain removed. He'd crossed miles of baked earth on a dislocated knee evading Enclave soldiers. Once he'd been sloppy and a deathclaw had managed to get a talon hooked through his ribcage. Fawkes had been forced to chop off the monster's hand and carry him home to Megaton over his shoulder like a child to get it removed. In the years since he'd been banished from the Vault, he'd bled gallons of his own blood into the blasted sands of the Waste. He wasn't stupid enough to consider himself fearless. Far from it. He figured he knew as well as anyone how fragile a thread anchored him to this life. Maybe better than most.
Still, if anyone had told him that a patch of dry skin would have him terrified for his life, he'd have laughed in their face.
Yet that's all it was when he first discovered it; a small blotch no bigger than his pinky-nail, just above the hollow of his throat. He was sure he'd never have noticed it if he hadn't been shaving, only stopping to reexamine the anomaly after he'd finished and wiped the remaining lather from his chin.
It didn't stand out very drastically from the skin around it. It was simply a bit duller and somewhat rougher under his fingertips. He hadn't allowed himself to dwell on it. It definitely wasn't cause for alarm. If he'd learned anything in five years of exile, it was that the Capital Wasteland was a harsh place. There were probably a dozen things he'd yet to be exposed to that would harmlessly explain the blemish. Dozens.
Because it definitely wasn't that.
_bluebells:Post the first sentence (or three) from every WIP you're currently working on, even if it's very short. Then invite people to ask questions about your WIPs. With any luck, you'll get talking about writing, and the motivation to take that WIP one step closer to completion will appear as if by magic!
This is nowhere near complete.
I'm anal, though, so these are short excerpts rather than first lines. Bear with me...
Castle
"Of Mice and Men: Chapter Two: Fish, Ponds and Things of That Sort" (Ryan/Esposito): A crossover with the comic Fables, written for
adja999, in which Ryan has an...unusual hidden past.Long ago, a friend in Fabletown had given him some advice for learning to blend in amongst the Mundanes: "Don't pretend to be who you're supposed to be, be who you're supposed to be."
More specifically, she had suggested he use the new false name that they had given him as often as he could—in his own head whenever possible. It had helped, and after a while when he introduced himself as Arthur LeSouris, even if it hadn't really been the truth, it had stopped feeling like a lie. It was like the old saying that clothes made the man. Over the last seventy years, slipping on a new name and identity had come to feel a bit like slipping on a new suit: uncomfortable at first, but everything fit better once you had a chance to break it in. A name was only ever just a name if you didn't believe it...
As he measured things, Kevin Ryan wasn't someone he pretended to be, and hadn't been for a long time.
"Ecdysis" (Ryan/Esposito): Wing!fic (kinda) that I promised
roachstar ages ago, in which Kevin is hiding something, Jenny is wrong about what it is."Is Kevin cheating on me?"
Javier forgave himself the rude silence as he stared at Jenny, but one would think his best friend's fiance could manage a friendly "Hello" first. Not that he and Jenny had ever been particularly friendly. It wasn't that they didn't get along, it was just that neither one of them had ever had much use for the other. They might as well live on completely different planets, except for the single point of overlap in their lives which was Kevin Ryan.
Or so he had thought, anyway. Her question begged clarification.
"Everywhere and His Nasty Parlour Tricks" (Ryan/Esposito): In which Ryan shows his undercover skills, Javier is caught off guard, and apparently "Peppermint" was a real guy...
The thing that was giving Javier the most trouble right now was this. Kevin Ryan wasn't just his partner. Upon being assigned together, they'd slid past partners with shocking speed and into friendship pretty damned easily. No, Kevin Ryan was his friend, his best friend, and had been for a long time. For more than three years they had shared each others' space for most of every workday, and spent a hefty portion of their free time in the others' company as well. Which sounded like he was gushing, but the point was that he had spent enough boring stakeouts and late-hours paperwork crunches with the guy that he figured he knew the big goof pretty well.
But now his brain was stalled, trying to catch up with what his eyes are seeing and figure out how he'd somehow managed to get everything so wrong. Because his reality had taken a hard knock when Montgomery's betrayal was exposed, and his equilibrium still wasn't anywhere near what it could be. And now nothing was right about a world where Ryan was sprawled out casually on the lap of the hugest biker Javier had ever seen, cigarette hanging lax on his lips, playing poker for crumpled bills and tiny bags of meth.
Not Ryan, he reminded himself harshly, scrubbing the confusion from his features before anyone around them could notice. Donovan. Evan Donovan.
"Misdial" (Ryan/Esposito): (aka, the fic I will never actually have the balls to finish...) In which Javier gets drunk and phone-sexes the wrong number, which somehow becomes a thing between him and Kevin. Because it's not gay or even cheating when they're not even the same room with each other...
If someone had told him a month ago that his engagement would come to an end because of another man, he would never have believed it. Not Jenny, not ever. If that same person insinuated that the man in question would be Javier, Ryan probably would have broken their nose where they stood. If, however, Ryan could be held back from murder long enough for this hypothetical someone to say that he would be the one to break faith, with his partner... Honestly, even a month ago, he might have paused for thought. Which, he supposed, just went to prove the point that a whole was often greater than the sum of its parts.
It happened like this.
"Slice of Life: Refraction" (Ryan/Esposito): An AU of an AU based on the Life 'verse story "Reflection". Basically, how things would have gone if Kevin had been infected instead.
Things with Jenny had started to fall apart very early on—only four days after his exposure, when the anemia had become severe enough that it was clear the treatments weren't working. It was at that point they had first been forced to acknowledge what inevitably lie ahead. He wasn't hospitalized until the fever developed, and while it was possible that she might have been there for part of it, during the more lucid moments Kevin couldn't remember seeing her. She did visit a few times after it broke, however, and for a while he held on to the hope that maybe... He managed to fool himself for a while. He would probably never forget the look on her face the day she realized that his uncharacteristic quietness was due to distraction—that the sick, violent thoughts had already begun to invade his mind.
After that, she had stopped coming entirely.
"Fools Rush In" (Ryan/Esposito): A stand-alone entry into the Quis Custodiet 'verse (ie, my 5-0 fic, "'Aloha' Doesn't Mean Goodbye"), crossover with Supernatural. Javier has gone missing under mysterious circumstances. With the case threatening to go cold, Kevin abandons the rules and goes hunting for the truth behind his partner's disappearance.
As he entered the apartment―quietly, so quietly―Kevin Ryan couldn't help but feel like he was sneaking into his own home.
His mother had always told him he had an honest face. Which was a polite way in her terms of saying that he sucked at lying. He'd learned early on that nine times out of ten he was better off not even trying. Which wasn't to say he was entirely hopeless. He had a good devious mind, he just needed an accomplice to distract from the anxiety that inevitably shone through―"like a deer in traffic" one ex had told him. Growing up, that role had normally fallen to one sister or the other. In high school, his best friend Matthew Sullivan had displayed a dazzling talent as a decoy.
In his time with the NYPD, Kevin had had a number of partners, each with varying degrees of suitability to the job they were unwittingly taking on with the assignment. While a few of them had been spectacular, though, none had ever come close to Javier Esposito.
Javier always projected this tough, no-nonsense exterior that even Kevin had taken a few months to see through. It contrasted well with his own dorky and unassuming image. When Kevin ventured a falsehood, no matter how ridiculous, Javier could manage a marvelous deadpan; a face that eloquently read "I'm buying this, why won't you?" With sufficient preparation, the combination was nearly bulletproof, and those talents had been sorely missed in the undertaking Kevin had made earlier that day.
Of course, if Javier had been available for the job, Kevin wouldn't have been stealing case files from the station in the first place.
Hawaii Five-0
"Proof of Life" (Danny/Steve): A 5-0 story set in the Life AU, where zombies, called "post-vitals", have legal rights.
The case that changed everything was a dumped body.
The victim was Caucasian, female, dressed in the torn and filthy remnants of a short, light-colored dress, but the condition of the corpse made age difficult to identify. Her long brown hair was badly tangled, her cheeks hollow, the skin tight and thin-looking as if she'd suffered severe dehydration before her death. It was the wounds that were of the most concern, however. Bite wounds, several of them, small but deep, where flesh had been removed from her forearms, and her lips were damaged as well. From the bite radius and dental imprints, the bites appeared to be human.
Human teethmarks suggested the killer might have been post-vital—or at least IHN infected—a possibility that Steve processed with a vague surprise.
"Synonymy" (Danny/Steve): A 5-0 story using the same rules for werewolves as my Castle fic "Evidence to the Contrary".
It wasn't that Danny had wanted to slug Steve during their first case. He'd had to. He knew a dominance play when he saw one, and he wasn't about to put up with that shit. And without possibly being able to understand what it had meant to Danny, Steve had seemed to be on board, because for all that Steve was the boss, from that point on, for the most part they operated as equals.
Still, he hadn't realized just how screwed he was in until he walked into McGarrett's home one morning, only realizing after the fact that he hadn't bothered to knock.
That wasn't how he behaved with co-workers. That wasn't even how he behaved with most friends. That was a trust thing, a family thing.
A pack thing.
"Abyssus Abyssum Invocat" (Danny/Steve): I tried to jump on the selkie!fic bandwagon after reading
whogeek's story "Family Secrets".He was hunting for some tool or another in his garage when he stumbled on the box bearing his mother's name. In it were a few of her things he vaguely remembered from childhood, pictures, a favorite ring.
He's not sure what he's found when he finds it, stuffed in the bottom of the box, wrapped in an old sheet long since devoured by moths. He's not sure why his heart jumps when his hand touches it, though it is oddly warm, and slick, and smells of the sea. The sound of the surf carries loudly into the garage, just then. Then Danny calls, and he puts the question away for another day.
Torchwood
"Eventuality" (Rex/Esther, Rex/Jack): Rex is aparently not a popular character amongst old fans of the show. I only got the chance to watch "Children of Earth" before "Miracle Day" started, so I never had that bias...
The thing that bothered him the most was that he wasn't even thinking about Jack when the idea first crossed his mind. He was thinking of Esther. Thinking of how unfair it was that they'd been lying side by side—dying side by side—when the Miracle ended, and yet he'd survived. Thinking of how short a time they'd really had together, even by normal standards. Thinking about how every day that passed pushed him farther away from all of those moments they'd shared. Thinking about how, one day, there would be so much distance between them—so many years, experiences, people—that he might forget they had ever meant anything at all...
Thinking about how much he was beginning to hate those words, "one day", now that it appeared he had so many ahead of him.
One day, its going to seem like a good idea...
Fallout 3
"It's Just the End of the World Again" : The Lone Wanderer undergoes transformation into a ghoul.
He'd been shot, stabbed, clawed, bitten, burned, blasted, stung, and electrocuted. He'd been drugged, and had part of his brain removed. He'd crossed miles of baked earth on a dislocated knee evading Enclave soldiers. Once he'd been sloppy and a deathclaw had managed to get a talon hooked through his ribcage. Fawkes had been forced to chop off the monster's hand and carry him home to Megaton over his shoulder like a child to get it removed. In the years since he'd been banished from the Vault, he'd bled gallons of his own blood into the blasted sands of the Waste. He wasn't stupid enough to consider himself fearless. Far from it. He figured he knew as well as anyone how fragile a thread anchored him to this life. Maybe better than most.
Still, if anyone had told him that a patch of dry skin would have him terrified for his life, he'd have laughed in their face.
Yet that's all it was when he first discovered it; a small blotch no bigger than his pinky-nail, just above the hollow of his throat. He was sure he'd never have noticed it if he hadn't been shaving, only stopping to reexamine the anomaly after he'd finished and wiped the remaining lather from his chin.
It didn't stand out very drastically from the skin around it. It was simply a bit duller and somewhat rougher under his fingertips. He hadn't allowed himself to dwell on it. It definitely wasn't cause for alarm. If he'd learned anything in five years of exile, it was that the Capital Wasteland was a harsh place. There were probably a dozen things he'd yet to be exposed to that would harmlessly explain the blemish. Dozens.
Because it definitely wasn't that.
