the WIP i’m working on now and i’m determined not to abandon is fader fic, which is a fic in which i try to answer: how might you fall in love with someone, or start to anyway, without having ever met them? and when i started thinking through that concept, i decided it had to happen in a universe in which some people randomly (well, not really randomly but i can’t give away all my secrets) fade into some other kind of existence that isn’t known or fully understood by those who remain, in which those who have faded have historically continued to interact with their loved ones in a manner similar to what i’d call a residual haunting. so, we know they still exist in some fashion. but how? and why don’t they just come back?

and then i was working through this late last summer/early fall, when travis sanheim, my favorite were-goat son, absolutely emotionally obliterated me with that post about tk visiting his hometown and i spent several months (like 6) thinking about how I’d write the damn fic but the truth is it’s going to be really hard to pull off and i will most certainly not meet my own expectations and i’ve been protecting myself from that experience for awhile and it’s just time to let it happen. here’s a snippet from part way in, when sandra and tk have started to work out a kind of system of engagement:

Observations: the beer was there when Travis got home from work. When he got back from running. When he went to bed. But some time between bed and morning, the beer was gone. It made sense, based on Travis's single experience with Other Travis, in person, and the stories people told him all day at the lab. But now he could start to form a hypothesis. Were other displaced people also able to physically manifest? As far as he knew, there weren't any recorded incidents of re-encounter.

He pushed his bedtime back in increments. 10:30: beer there. 10:45: beer there. 11:30: beer still there. But by morning: gone.

By Wednesday the six pack was empty. Reaching into the fridge in the morning for eggs, and there it was: empty six-pack, new note.

More, please?

Other Travis was polite, at least. And if he'd been without beer for the better part of a year. Well, Travis couldn't blame him.

The bridge formed out of the darkness when they rounded the corner. It was barely more than one lane and shiny with ice under the truck’s headlights. Mackie always said he was going to put up a railing, but talk was cheap.

“Careful,” Taylor said, as Travis pulled the truck onto the bridge’s narrow path.

“Yeah, yeah.” Travis knew already how it was going to go. Still, the bottom of his stomach fell out when the truck swerved and skidded, and the back end swung wildly from one side of the bridge to the other.

He clutched the wheel, though it never made a difference, and turned his head in time to see Taylor bracing himself against the dashboard, before the truck slid off the side of the bridge.

They landed in the river. He could never make sense of this part, afterwards - one second, they were falling; the next second, they were in the truck, in the river, water ankle-deep in the cab and coming in fast.

Travis clawed himself out of his seatbelt and went to kick out his window, like usual. But this time the window was stuck. Taylor moaned next to him in the passenger’s seat. His forehead was streaked with blood.

“Hang on,” he said. Panic clawed at him, its grip as familiar as the icy water pouring into the truck. He kept kicking at the window. Again, again. But the window was stuck. The water was up to the seat, now. There wasn’t anything he could do. “Help,” he yelled. Like Mackie could hear them from half a mile away. Everything was cold. The river sucked at the truck, pushing it around in the water.

It was pitch-black in the cab. Taylor was so quiet - was he even still there? Sometimes he wasn’t, anymore. Travis turned to look, but something was pinning his shoulders back, shaking him like a dog.

“Buddy, buddy, hey. Wake up.”

It wasn’t the water, or some new trick of his dream. There were actual hands on his shoulders, shaking him awake. Hands, attached to body, looming over Travis in the dark of his room —