ParanoidParade

@stcreators event 05: dynamics | @pscentral event 24: team tools ↳ Robin + Steve + Nancy

you want blood and i promised

Robin tries not to let it consume her. 

She tries to let it go. 

But her dreams are filled with swirling smoke, a cocoon tightening around her until she’s suffocating, until her lungs are soot black and frozen. And she wakes every night gasping for breath and soaked in sweat, clinging to Steve like he’s the only anchor to reality. And she swears - she swears - that there are shadows stalking her, always lurking in the corners, just outside her vision. 

For weeks after the steelworks incident, Robin tries desperately to stop thinking about it. If she pretends she’s fine, then she’s fine, right? If she squeezes her eyes shut and counts the spaces between her breaths and runs through all of the grounding statements she and Steve practiced, eventually she’ll be okay again. 

She drifts through the days, untethered, floating far above herself like the sky is trying to reclaim her, like the night remembers that the atoms making up her body were forged in the violent explosions of ancient stars thousands of years ago. Like the stardust she’d been loaned is overdue at the library of space, like she’s been on borrowed time since she’d been born. 

Steve knows something’s up. He keeps catching her zoning out, lost in her mental spiral of there is black dust in the steel mill there are remnants inside me it will come back and you will hurt everyone you love and there is nothing, nothing you can do about it. He notices every time it takes her a moment too long to respond, every time she cuts her food up into smaller pieces without ever raising her fork to her mouth, every time she digs her nails into her skin to try and stop it from eating her alive. 

Is her blood black like-

She squeezes ice in white knuckled fists, and she thinks it’s almost as cold as the remnants inside of her. Sometimes she feels phantom claws digging into her heart. Her body remembers it, remembers the feeling of all the cold settling deep in the marrows of her bones.

Her body remembers - and it craves - the feeling of bleeding out. Draining her life out into cold dirt. Making room for something else to inhabit her earthly vessel. 

She is just dust. 

I am not dust. And I am not on an island. 

If only she could believe it. 

part 4 of lion hearted girl - the season 3 flayed!robin au (read here on ao3!)

okay. writers of tumblr. i’ve compiled a list of things i desperately wish someone had sat me down and said before i started writing, not that i would’ve listened, because i was 14 and powered entirely by hubris, iced coffee, and my wattpad era.

anyway. here we go:

1. stop rewriting chapter one. i know you think it’ll fix everything. it won’t. it’s a hydra. you cut one head off, two Google Docs appear.

2. your first draft is not a treaty with god. it can be messy. it can be unhinged. it can have 47 placeholders named “idk something happens.” it’s fine.

3. perfectionism is just fear wearing a blazer. write badly on purpose. humiliate your draft. it builds character (yours).

4. word count culture is a scam. you are allowed to write 200 words and call it a day. you are allowed to write 5k and then disappear into the void for three business weeks.

5. google docs autosave WILL betray you. download backups. then back up your backups. then sacrifice a pen to the writing gods idk.

6. description is not pretty synonyms. it’s specificity. the torn movie ticket in their pocket. the buzzing light in the hallway. the chipped nail polish on their thumb. write the thing not the aesthetics around the thing.

7. dialogue isn’t two Shakespeare ghosts monologuing at each other. interruptions. trailing off. people lying. people avoiding the truth. people saying “whatever man.” let it get messy.

8. you don’t need a whole map before you start. sometimes you just need one character with one problem and the stupidest idea imaginable.

9. reading your old writing will make you cringe but also cry a little because wow you cared so much. keep that version of you alive.

10. don’t wait to ‘be good.’ you get good by writing the stuff you think is embarrassing.

11. also: nine out of ten times, your “bad” idea is actually the one that goes feral and grows teeth and becomes your WIP.

12. hydrate. no further explanation.

ok that’s it because if i keep going i’ll start confessing things about the time i wrote a whole novel in 2017 that will never see daylight again.

Never has been, never will be.