first lines

[queenslayerbee]

I took this challenge from ravensilversea here. I thought it would be fun!

Rules: List the first line of your last 10 14 (posted) fics and see if there’s a pattern!

I picked 14 because that's how many fics I've published, as of now, in 2026. They have all being crossposted here on dreamwidth (and since the start of this month I've begun doing the same with older ones).

Now, in reverse order of publication:

• "You and I should go to the Rivers Casino," Santos told her, blasé as ever. "Bet you're really good at counting cards." ace in the hole. The Pitt, Javadi/Santos.

• Kyle would think he must be dreaming —except for how he's never felt so present in his body, so keenly aware of the nerve endings in each of his fingertips. So exultant, and at once, fearful. carnal idolatry. Terminator, Kyle/Sarah.

• As it did every so often, Laura's mind drifted towards poor, ill-fated Bertha. hating me through death and after. Carmilla (J. Sheridan Le Fanu's novella), Carmilla/Laura.

• It's everything she could have dreamed, as if her world has expanded —not just around her, the world she can touch and hear and affect and be affected by, but on the inside; she's finally faced with a challenge, and for the first time she feels like she is all but stumbling, scrambling and struggling to catch up, under-educated and plainly naïve and oblivious. true thirst. Bridgerton, Eloise x academia.

• Tara is a bitch; she doesn't swallow her tongue or her pain like a good dainty woman —a model heroine, turning the other cheek with a smile for those who harmed her; she lacks that saintly forgiving heart. hearsay. DC comics, Tara Markov.

• "Pick another movie." bat-man and robins. Stranger Things, Dusteve pre-slash.

• The little girl didn't look much like Mia, for where she shared their father's features —compact but athletic build, hair like hay, chocolate-brown eyes, easily-tanned skin, sharp jaw—, the kid had grown to resemble her own ailing mother: lanky, porcelain-pale, with tight black curls and a moon-shaped face; but in her half-sister's eyes, if the wrong shade of brown, Mia spotted the same haunted quality that she'd seen in the mirror, over fifteen years ago. better than being the prey. DC comics, Mia Dearden.

• Her new body's palms are rough, something as extravagant as moisturizer undeniably foreign to them; bathrobe fallen on the ground, Josephine uses coarse fingertips to examine its imperfections —idle, she picks at the unevenly tanned skin; lingering, she rubs them against the leather rash in the inner tights; vicious, she nudges the tender bruise on the belly. pillage. The 100, Clarke/Josephine.

• The wool fell off Maika's eyes long ago; she knew Tuya intimately, the way you're bound to when someone cracked open your chest cavity and burrowed a place for themselves within your very bones, blood, and viscera. bloodless, Monstress (Image Comics), Maika/Tuya.

• Nona practices in the mirror. mimicry. The Locked Tomb, Nona x Camilla.

• When Helena startles awake, the last thing her eyes caught on were the elevator doors closing on their way to the severed floor, and the first thing they see now are the tiles on her father's kitchen floor; the second, him, gasping, desperate, choking on his own blood, the offending device in his hand; the third, the knife in her own blood-soaked hands. clean hands. Severance, Helena & Helly R.

• The dreams are all the more unsettling, eerie, because nothing wrong happens in them; Henry Creel comes to her as Mr. Whatsit —as a protector, as a friend, with a pleasant face and a gentle voice and a pair of warm hands, tucking her into bed and plying her with gifts and promises of safety and freedom and adventure. her arms, a fortress. Stranger Things, Holly & Nancy.

• It takes a village to raise Diana: grown warriors, scholars, pioneers, who see her as the child they once indulged —yet her body changes and her desire grows, itching under her skin with melancholic jealousy, barred from the women's games and rituals. replica. DC comics, Diana/Donna.

• We want you open —like a flower whose petals desperately seek the warmth of the sun; like the loud pop of a yogurt's lid, then licked clean; like a patient's skull drilled into after the skin has been carefully split apart with a scalpel. communion. Pluribus, The Hive x Carol.

Well, one thing across the board is that I can string a long (but hopefully understandable) sentence lmao, but to be fair, all but four of these were for the three sentence ficathon. It's a feature, not a bug xD. You MUST do terrible things to punctuation. And on top of being strict about the just-three-sentence rule, I give myself an extra one by keeping the ficlets at precisely 100/200/etc. words.

Something else I've always noticed is that in fics that are meant to be humorous I do tend to start mid-dialogue. Snappy banter is the perfect tool for that.

Also, these are all very short ficlets (the longest one is Carmilla's, a triple drabble sequence of 900 words, and all the others have 300, 200, and mostly 100 words). So they're very to-the-point fics, as well as character-centric ones, where I immediately (or nearly so) dive into the character's state of mind. In many other stories I prefer to start setting-first, or action-first, to ground them in whatever I feel should get the focus to set the story, and in some of these you can see the barest bit of context like that, but short-form limits you. And yet, working within those limits to imbue each sentence with all the relevant information, trying to find the right spin on a description, is incredibly fun.

It could be interesting to do this again later on in the year, maybe when I have posted longer fics that aren't limited to drabble form (except one, which I kept 300 words long just for fun, all of these where either for the three sentence ficathon, or seasons of drabbles). I think there could be a lot of shorter first lines, stuff that's meant to paint a vivid but immediate picture on the reader's mind without so many twists and turns. I like to target the senses, too (smell, etc.) in order to achieve it, maybe using a bit of "shocking" imagery to get the point across. 

So I'm definitely keeping this meme in mind to go back to it later on ^-^

Comments

[kitarella_imagines]

Oh yes I went way back for this set of first lines of dialogue. Some of mine were really boring, like 'hello' and 'what?' I had to look for more interesting first lines 😅