WIP Week: Day 1 (Sunday)
Mar. 18th, 2018 10:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
itsadrizzitI owe you all a few postings of some fanworks and hopefully I'll get to those soon. I also meant to do a quick review/recs list of what I thought was the best of ITPE (the Informal Twitter Podfic Exchange) and perhaps that will still happen, although I may have to give a re-listen to some things before I get to that.
Right now, though, there's a challenge going on over on Tumblr called "WIP Week" that challenges people to put in some work on their works in progress. While I have multiple and thought about trying to honour the themed days of the challenge, I ultimately decided that my efforts would be best spent actually trying to complete one solid draft of my newest WIP and the only thing I have attempted to write for the entire duration of 2018 thus far. It's past time and I have solidified a solid structure/flow (which was a big part of why I wasn't working on it--it didn't know where it wanted to go), so I want to try to get it done to move on to other, bigger, more challenging, more terrifying, more exciting projects.
So...I'll be cross-posting my Tumblr entries on the subject over here, just for fun and accountability and out of some weird sense of guilt that I never actually post in this journal.
Today for WIP Week I was writing a scene where Christian is thinking about how he’d finally gotten back into a normal rhythm and routine and sleep pattern, adjusting to life without Vincent, when Vincent showed up and stayed with him for a week and threw everything off again. This leads into a flashback (it’s a sort of current event triggering flashback framing story sort of thing) where Christian is remembering how hard everything was for the first months after Vincent left and how he’d been unable to sleep and had needed to drag himself through training, etc.
In the middle of the scene, this song came up on my playlist (it’s my Chris x Vince playlist, so really every song is somehow appropriate for what I’m working on), and I just sort of stopped writing and closed my eyes and let myself try to channel these feelings for a minute.
I don’t think I captured them in the chapter, but they’re in there hanging over it, begging to be let out. This might not be the fic that does it. I may never actually write the fic that does it. I know what happens in Chris’s life when Vincent leaves and I allude to it often and say I’ll write it, but who knows. Every time I start to write the fic outlining it, I can’t write that fic and i end up saying “this needs to go in this direction instead”, so perhaps it will forever live on as a headcanon I can verbally (or via stream-of-consciousness writing) throw at you if you want to hear it, but it may never be a story and that’s okay.
Still…these feelings are there and hopefully once I come back into this and start revising i can coax them out.
For now…I share with you today’s work. It’s in it’s raw form–I’ve not edited, I’ve not revised, I’ve just written. I make no claims on quality or coherency or correct use of the English language (or the Dutch language, tbh), and I’m a bit afraid to share it here because I almost never let anyone in on the process at this early stage of development, but that’s the spirit of WIP Week, I suppose, so here it is, presented for all of you with every single one of its failings and flaws. Hopefully it will be better by the time it sees the real light of day as published work.
Enjoy–we’re deep in Chris’s head and he’s actually having feelings for once and everything is still heartbreaking, welcome to my tragic world.
Chris climbed to his feet and slid back until he could lean against the wall and stretch his legs out in front of him, wincing at the ache in his joints and his shins from being folded in one place for too long. He probably should have set up some sort of timer on his phone to remind him to stand and take a break once an hour. Turning up for training on Monday with a stiff back and aching knees wasn’t going to do anyone any good.
In an effort to work the feeling back into his cramped and burning legs, he headed downstairs to grab a glass of water. Judging from the way the sun was hanging low in the sky, it was later in the day than he’d thought it was. Toby would be showing up soon to eat dinner and watch the FA Cup match, so Chris would have to continue his clear out tomorrow. He’d been working all day and although he’d made noticeable progress, he still mostly just had a mess on his hands.
Not that he was in a hurry to finish the job or anything. Honestly, he wasn’t even sure why he was doing it other than out of some weird sense of obligation.
Not like it matters. Chris still hadn’t been able to bring himself to ask Vincent to come back to him, so it wasn’t like anyone would be using the room any time soon, anyway.
Chris leaned against his kitchen island, water glass in hand. It was getting hard to believe that only few short weeks ago he’d stood here with Vincent beside him, their hips bumping together, his body radiating heat against Chris’s side.
That was what he’d missed the most, he thought. The warmth of another person beside him. Not just at night as he lay in his bed that now felt too big and too cold, but everywhere he went. He was getting used to it now, although he had to admit that having Vincent here beside him for a while again–handing him a mug of coffee in the morning, wrapping him in an embrace as soon as he stepped in the door from another grueling training session, waving down at him from the Wembley stands and greeting him with a grin and a hug in the car park after the match–had reminded him once again of how things could be. Chris had started to get back to life without Vincent, but it seemed like everything might always feel a bit odd from now on, at least until life brought them back into the same place once more.
Right, Chris. More like if life ever brings us back to the same place again.
Until then, Chris supposed, he would continue coming home each night to his big, empty house and wondering what one person was supposed to do with all this space. It had all seemed perfectly normal before Vincent had found his way into Chris’s life–just a house, Chris’s home, somewhere he could keep to himself and do whatever he wanted and invite his friends over for dinner and video games and television like any other person just going about their life–but ever since Vincent had left, the big house Chris had once loved just seemed to be missing a piece, everything waiting anxiously for the other occupant to return.
Chris had done well to get back to what he remembered as normality–life as he’d lived it before Vincent, as it were. Nights out with his teammates when he could, although usually they were all so drained after training that none of them wanted to do anything besides relax at home. Which, for Chris, more often than not these days, meant wandering around his house trying to find something to keep himself occupied.
The biggest problem was that everything in his house was a constant reminder of Vincent–the kitchen where they’d laughed together and stolen kisses over mugs of coffee, the patio where they’d sat in whatever rays of sun London would give them and drank glasses of wine or ate dinner or just talked, the sofa where they’d spent so many nights curled together beneath a blanket laughing or gasping at shows on television or Netflix. Now, Chris’s DVR backlog had piled up until it was nearly full and his Netflix queue remained untouched, saved up for some unknown time in the probably distant future when they could stay up all night marathoning them together.
He knew Vincent would chastise him for not getting caught up on the shows they’d been watching together before Vincent moved away, but Chris hadn’t been able to bring himself to watch more than a few episodes of each. The shows weren’t the same without Vincent beside him, laughing and gasping, his every reaction playing out on his face. In truth, it seemed, Chris had enjoyed watching Vincent watch the shows as much as he’d enjoyed the shows themselves. Sometimes more.
Chris yawned, then shook his head a bit to clear his brain from what seemed like a near constant fog. For as much as he’d spent the better part of the past week feeling miserable–every joint aching, his body flipping constantly between too hot and too cold as he coughed his way through both days and nights, hardly keeping track of which was which as he lay in his bed desperately trying to shake his illness–at least he’d been able to lay in his bed without thinking about how impossibly large and cold it was with Vincent gone.
In the months following Vincent’s move to Istanbul, Chris spent more nights than not lying awake in a bed that felt impossibly large. Chris had always been a light sleeper and enjoyed his space, but he’d gotten used to sleeping beside Vincent, both of them pressed into the centre of Chris’s oversized mattress, their limbs tangled together, heat radiating between them, the air filled with the sound of their shared breaths. Without Vincent his room felt too cold and the neighbourhood too silent, and Chris found himself staring up at the stark white ceiling, lit with a dim blue-white glow from the streetlamps outside, willing himself to sleep so he might not be a complete mess for training the next morning.
Still, despite his best efforts, Chris had to drag himself to breakfast every day, his eyelids heavy, and his mind in a fog. Every motion he made during training felt like trying to swim through jelly; his steps dragging as though his legs had been shoved into buckets of concrete. After a week, and Pochettino had pulled him aside and asked him if he was feeling alright. Chris had considered for a moment, then just nodded and said, “Yes, sorry. Just a bit off my game, I suppose. I’ll work through it.”
That night, he’d grabbed the spare pillow from his bed–trying not to let himself think of it as Vincent’s pillow–and carried it down the hall to the spare room where he’d thrown himself onto Vincent’s sofa and pressed his face into the smooth fabric, turning to bury his face into the soft cushions in the hopes that he might not feel like the empty place beside him in his bed was about to swallow him whole. Vincent’s scent still lingered in the creases of both pillow and sofa, and Chris just let himself breathe it in until he felt his body relax and he slid into sleep.
Vincent’s sofa–his most prized possession–now entrusted to Chris’s care.
The two had been seated on it the night before Vincent left, the floor around it littered with boxes and stray odds and ends–not much different than my upstairs room right now, Chris thought, smiling to himself.
Except in that scene, Vincent is beside me.
Chris had rushed over to Vincent’s apartment from the training centre the day he’d heard the news of Vincent’s transfer, not bothering to shower or even change out of his training gear. The second the final whistle blew, Chris had yelled his goodbyes to his teammates, pausing only long enough to engage in the handshakes and slaps on the back that Pochettino asked of them before he was running down the corridor to the carpark and diving into his car, heedless of his friends’ confused shouts of “Christian, where are you going?” trailing down the corridor after him.
He’d crashed into Vincent’s apartment, gasping for breath after his full sprint up three flights of stairs, and found Vincent seated in the middle of the living room, his few possessions flung in haphazard piles across the floor. Vincent had looked up at him, a look of hardened steel in his red-rimmed eyes for the briefest of moments before Chris had crashed into him and the two of them had collapsed to the floor, hands stroking against skin and tangling in hair and clothing as they just lay there and held one another in silence.
Later, most of Vincent’s belongings carefully packed into boxes and meticulously labeled–by Chris, of course, despite Vincent’s shrugged protests that it didn’t matter and it wasn’t as though he owned all that much anyway–the two of them sat side-by-side on the sofa, scooping the last remnants of an ordered-in dinner out of cardboard containers.
Vincent had placed his empty carton on the container then turned to Chris with such a serious expression on his face that when he’d asked, “Chris, can you do me a favour?” Chris had been half afraid that Vincent was going to somehow drop even worse news than “I’m moving to Istanbul for a year”.
“What am I supposed to say when you ask it like that?” Chris had said. “I guess…it depends on how strange?”
Vincent smiled over at him and shook his head. “It’s…about my sofa.”
Chris didn’t bother trying to suppress his groan. Vincent’s relationship with that sofa was bordering on unhealthy. “I should have known. If it’s about getting it shipped to you, the club can handle it. You’re still a Spurs player for now and I’m sure they can make all the arrangements.”
“No.” Vincent shook his head. “I don’t even know where I’ll be staying yet when I arrive. They will probably have me in a hotel until I can choose an apartment and then, well, I do hope to come back after my loan. So…”
He shrugged and flicked his gaze downward, and Chris reached out to stroke the scruff along the sharp edge of his jaw.
“I was wondering…if you might take it. I know it doesn’t really fit with the rest of your things, but I just thought…you have that spare room, the one with all the boxes and…Nevermind. It’s too much to ask. I’ll have it sent back home to my mother. She can keep it or sell it or…something.”
Chris pressed two fingers to Vincent’s chin, pressing upward to get Vincent to raise his gaze to meet his own.
“You can’t sell your sofa. It’s your most precious possession.”
Vincent shrugged, trying and failing fix his face into an expression of casual apathy. “Shipping it doesn’t make sense. Besides, it’s old. I can get a better one wherever I end up next.”
Chris let out a breath of a laugh as he shook his head. This damn sofa. Vincent was right, the plush cushions and textured grey fabric would look highly out of place among Chris’s sleek wooden tables and modular leather furnishings. Then again, that was the funny thing about he and Vincent. Looked at from a distance they were far from a match, but if you took a moment to look a bit closer they somehow just…fit.
Chris leaned in and pressed a chaste kiss to Vincent’s mouth. I’ll keep it here for you, he thought. Ready and waiting. Safe in my house until you come back to me. The pieces of your life all intertwined with mine, the way they should have been from the start.
He’d almost spoke the words, then, ready to offer Vincent a space in his life whenever he wanted it. When you come back, Vincent, if you need somewhere to stay… Or perhaps I know you have to leave, Vincent, but I hope someday I can be the place you’ll return to.
But he’d stopped himself. Toby’s warnings echoing through his head. You know there are no guarantees in football, Chris. You knew this was coming. Vincent isn’t a bad player, but sometimes things don’t work out. You can’t dwell on what wasn’t meant to be.
Instead, “Have the movers bring it by. You’re right. I never use the third bedroom for anything anyway. I can store it there until you decide what to do with it.”
A grateful smile flashed across Vincent’s face as he raised his eyes to meet Chris’s. “Thanks. I appreciate it.”
Chris resisted the urge to squirm uncomfortably and look away, desperately willing himself to hold it together, but uncertain that the moment he opened his mouth he wouldn’t just break down and pull Vincent to his chest and scream ‘Don’t go, don’t go, don’t go’ until they were both collapsed into the cushions sobbing. Neither of them needed that, now or ever.
Football was football and it could be cruel even on the best of days. The reality was that Vincent would be leaving, whether Chris wanted him to or now. In a few short hours Chris would return home from training to an empty house and an empty bed and he and Vincent may never be in the same place again. He knew that. He knew the realities of the situation.
Chris had shrugged and fixed Vincent with the most casual smile he could muster, given the circumstance. “Happy to help. I mean, it’s the least I can do, right?”
this is your own el dorado, I guess?
Date: 2018-03-19 10:11 am (UTC)Strangely, I kinda get what you mean? It's like nailing jelly to a wall. It took me a long time to get my fic to where it is on the page close to what I had in my head, so I feel you.
Re: this is your own el dorado, I guess?
Date: 2018-03-20 02:31 am (UTC)Yes, yes, yes. I know where I want it to go and what I want it to say but instead you get...this. Which is fine in its own right but wasn't what I set out to say.