A short blast of some fiction for NaNoWriMo or whatever we're calling it this year...

So I'm finally going to find some resolve to be creative regardless of tiredness and all manner of lockdown-based distractions. 'I will be creative' is one of the most useless sentences I can utter to myself (yes, I will sometimes talk to myself; often it's the only way to really assess what my brain is trying to put out there), but the point - that I will do things that enable creativity regardless of the barriers - is not a bad one. So I'm going to go for a scattergun approach to this, and just do whatever my brain wants for however long it can stand it, and then move on. If all the stuff is churning around, at least getting it out will allow the next thought to come. I have written on here about how sometimes I'm not so much writing a scene in These Matters so much as letting it out from wherever it hides/resides in the aether. Well, other things push too, so why not let them...?

Here's a short snippet of something I was working on a long time ago which I have now torn apart to re-write more in the style I have become a bit more accustomed to, namely that all the scenes are written as if they are on TV, so we can't access the internal processes of the characters and have to infer them from the evidence...

“Gaius…” A man in his early fifties speaks as he embraces the young man we have just met. “Tell me he did not suffer.”
“He did not. He was dead by the time I caught up with him.”
“Always… He believed in his own ability to cheat death.”
“He did. I called him back. I told him-”
“I do not hold you responsible. You know that.”
“I do. He wished to be the better brother.”
“And yet… Gaius, your brother accepted you. He accepted you as a brother, as my son.”
“That is a pleasant fiction.” Gaius smiles, pushing the other away from him. The smile twists into tears. 
“You are my son. I would stand before the gods and repeat it.”
“And they would remind you of who you are, and who I am.”
“You are Gaius Regulus Albus.”
“You are Regulus Serenus. I am no Roman.”
“Now is not the time to reject the name you took. When you are free from this grief, perhaps then. But not now.”
“I am sorry. For him. For your loss. For my part in it.”
Regulus Serenus tries to smile, but cannot. Gaius Regulus Albus puts his arm around his shoulders, which shake with weeping.

And, while I'm on, something a little bit more familiar:

I look at every face that I pass. I hope it is you, so that I might catch your eye, promise you by a look that I have never stopped thinking about you and I am sorry for all the ways I failed and that I am tearing myself apart wanting nothing more than to sit opposite you and tell you how I have been since last we met. To hear how you have been. To find out that your life has been good, and that I might be at peace because it doesn’t hurt you any longer. To know that you have lived out the things I have always thought best, even if the selfish bit of me hasn’t wanted you to live those things out. That you are able to just be in a world that doesn’t care if I am in it or not. 


We both know that it can’t be that way. To even exchange a glance would be to confirm everything that we are both duty-bound to forget. For you to smile at me… It would take us right back to where we once were, and all of the time since we were last together will have been for nothing, because it has not healed the wound at all. So when I look at those faces, trying to find you, I am doing my best not to find you. Not to catch your eye. Not to set it all off again. 


I was happier than I knew when I was with you.