wildcat88: Post a single sentence from each WIP you have (or as many as you want to pick). No context, no explanations. No more than one sentence.Caveat: some of these are actually from the fic graveyard, but I liked them enough to include them anyway. Only a couple, though.
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1. Tuesday . . . Tuesday was a litter box day: grit in his eyes when he woke up, cat-pee taste in his mouth even after five rounds with the toothbrush, an unpleasant odor that lingered past his minute-and-a-half, no-hot-water shower.
2. “How long have you been a child?” my father asked, the very model of disinterested inquiry.
3. “Committed murder yet?” Jeremiah asked, as he did every day, obscenely bright-eyed for whatever time it was.
4. “Can I help you?” he asks eventually, because the imaginary chirping crickets and shh of corn blowing in the wind are making him long vaguely for a place he’ll never see again.
5. His job’s to protect them, protect the scientists, watchdog to their sheep, as Major Sheppard once put it, and Aiden releases the Doc like he’s been burned, backs away until his back’s against the wall.
6. And normally John wouldn’t do this sort of thing, but Teyla is wet and shivering and stuck a galaxy away from her son on a planet that speaks many languages but not hers, so he wraps his arm around her shoulders, pulling her against him, and refuses to consider what it looks like to the people watching them.
7. The weight of the future rests heavy on him like water in his bones: the knowledge of what happened despite his best efforts.
8. Rodney stands in the doorway and stares for a minute, because there’s a girl on John’s bed and a part of him is going, “Nononono—my room, my friend. Mine.”
9. And (the boy runs; the boy stumbles; the boy falls; the boy drops to his knees and clutches at his eyes; the boy sees blood; the boy sees an empty field and a panting dog) the boy stops, watches dog and rabbit disappear back into the forest, wonders what just (didn’t happen; might have) happened.
10. Even if he hadn’t been illicitly harboring a cross-dimensional refugee it would have been an awkward conversation.
11. There are other soldiers down here, but he’s the only one who’s been buried; they treat him like a ghost, salute him like they’re saluting the wall behind him.
12. He’s experienced this before, walking down long-deserted hallways and feeling like he’s a pebble tossed into a still pool, his small sounds running away from him like ripples through water.
13. The one time he brought the subject up with Elizabeth, she all but plugged her ears and sang la la la, I can’t hear you.
14. Her voice breaks on the last word, the way it had the morning everything went wrong, and this is when John remembers that not all stories have happy endings and some stories are true.
15. Sheppard had never been anything more to her than a lazy smile and easy slouch—she knew what he’d done over the years to keep the city safe, but somehow she’d never really connected the various stories with the man who made Rodney watch bad sci-fi movies on the weekends.
16. “Those are the things I like,” she said, and his smile was like the glow of the perfect answer, that moment when everything falls into order.
17. Certainly, it never occurred to Draco that his mother might be mortal until the day she died, and not until many years later that she might be less than wise.
18. As it is, he's torn between desperately wanting her to live, to give him some bright spot out of the whole unspeakable tragedy, and half-hoping for her sake that she doesn't.
19. Back into himself until nothing showed but the masks he'd created long ago.
20. He knew now, sure as sure, that he needed to keep his mouth shut, needed to keep from further contaminating the timeline.
1. He wakes up because someone’s staring at him. At one point in the not-too-distant past, he would have known how long the staring had been going on, but he’s been out of the field long enough that he’s happy just to have any sort of radar left. Daniel’s breathing in Jack’s ear, the slow in-out of sleep—something Jack could fake, but it would never occur to Daniel to do so. Which means that the person staring at Jack is either Sheppard or some enterprising and very stupid burglar. And Jack refuses to think he’s that far gone, to not wake up when someone’s breaking into his house. Apartment.
