WIP Week: 1, Oldest WIP

[singedsun]

I meant to post this yesterday and then I was too exhausted. The whole weekend was kind of a wash.

Day One for wipweek

This conversation might be different if I had to go back and look at handwritten notes for original fic. I don't even know how to track down all of that anymore. Google Docs tells me I have unfinished original stuff back to like 2007 (which is probably the date on the first thing I saved there?) but a lot of those pieces are so small and really don't qualify as fics as much as they do loosely framed paragraphs about a story concept. The longer pieces I did start around 2010 got finished for various purposes and one of the short stories I had left unfinished I reworked just last year and it'll be out in an anthology later this year (yay!). All that to stay, I'm sticking with oldest fandom WIP.

I honestly thought my answer to this was going be Dragon Age related, just on volume alone. I've started and not finished a lot of DA stories. But I am happy to be proven wrong -- at least according to the dates in Google Docs. However, this is for another video game, The Path. Which I was, and continue to be, IN LOVE with. Little Red Riding Hood is one of my favorite fairy tales and I was writing fairy tale fanfic before I'd ever played this game. TBH, I even have beta reader comments in this Google Doc... so I was planning to finish it at some point, I just didn't.

If you're unfamiliar with The Path, it's a video game loosely based around Little Red Riding Hood where there is more than one girl in red, all of them sisters. Each of them leaves the Path for their own reasons and each of them finds their own 'wolf'. It's very atmospheric and sort of hides the horror of it so it's just like a long, aching dread until you finally come across the wolf. It definitely plays with the idea of innocence and growing up, which I find pretty powerfully done. I only wrote from the perspective of two of the sisters, though I had plans to write for all of them. Anyway, here's a little excerpt from the beginning:

There is only one path, and one wood. Mother says to stay on the path like there’s another option, like the woods are not already dark and foggy and strange enough to keep us away. Saying it’s so doesn’t make the path anymore appealing, or the woods anymore frightening.

We each nod and say ‘yes mother’ like it’s the first time she’s told us. When Robin sets out in the morning with a basket and her tiny red raincoat, she bobs her head and grins, showing the gap where her front tooth fell out. Mother trusts her, young as she is, as she trusts all of us. The path to Grandmother’s is wide and straight.

And there is only one path, and one wood.

When I was just a little older than Robin is now, our Father left. The apartment we live in has always been tiny compared to the places my friends live: each of us except for Mother and Robin taking turns sleeping on the couch or the floor. I thought after Father left, it would feel bigger but it didn’t, just darker and more empty. There’s isn’t even a hole where he was, or a space that we moved to fill and when I think of him, the rest just feels like shadow. If there is a reason for the shadows where a father should’ve been, Mother keeps it to herself.

Just down the path from the apartment is Grandmother’s cottage and even though she is old and often sick, she refuses to leave it. She and Mother don’t speak anymore, and neither of them has ever told us why, though we’ve all asked many times. Each day, Mother reminds us about the path and sends one of us down it to check on Grandmother in her place. Mother says the things we take to Grandmother - food and medicine, clean clothes when she needs them - are words enough for them both. And each day, Grandmother thanks us quietly and tells us to give Mother a kiss when we return. Unlike Mother, she never mentions the path, never tells us to stay on it, never asks how we arrive or how we’ll return.

Sometimes, when it’s my turn to take the basket, the dust from the path gets on my boots and I wonder what it’ll be like when Grandmother is gone. Will Mother be sick too, will I never go back to my studies and always be walking the path with my sisters even if no one is at the other end. I was the one that told Grandmother when Mother got sick too. I came home to help Mother to keep her illness from the girls. But, Grandmother knows. And still, neither will be the first to speak to the other.

It’s up to us to bear the weight of the path between them.

Bonus Question: What fandom would you love to revisit?
Once Dragon Age took over my fandom writing for the most part, I stopped writing fairy tale fic of any kind. LRRH and Alice in Wonderland stories being among my favorites. I feel like I should definitely go back and replay The Path, even if I never pick this specific story back up though.