Here's the full-length version of Afterwards; I hope to goodness it is an improvement, and not merely a 'director's cut'. I do wonder about some of Lucille's rantings (He was gone. He could not be gone...) But there were cuts I did keep, and sections that got largely rewritten; it's not just a blind copy of the first draft, which is one reason why this has taken so long despite the fact that I've already done it once!

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Afterwards

She could not find Thomas. And the world was breaking apart.

She was not certain who she was, or what had happened. Sometimes it seemed she could not think clearly at all, as if parts of her had ebbed away into the great emptiness outside as she played and left behind only a tenous knot of hatred and desire and need, twisting together like smoke. The house moaned about her — Home, she remembered, home and yet a burden — but the fire that flickered forever in the hearth, translucent over dead ashes, did not gutter or blaze up to the long-drawn breaths of the east wind, and the notes of the piano beneath her hands woke no answering vibrations in the air.

There was no reply at all, no presence anywhere. She was utterly alone.

Thomas. She had not known what she needed; the name welled out of her from some place deeper than memory, deeper than thought itself, spinning together wavering strands into a sudden focus of panic and loss.

Thomas— Thomas! She whirled up in panic, knowing now what it was she could not find. He was gone. He could not be gone. They could not take him from her. She could not be left here by herself for always. He could not leave her. He had promised. She had made him promise.

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I've been working on producing a 'full version' of Afterwards to be uploaded to fanfiction.net once the competition judging period is over (the entry period doesn't expire until the end of December, and on past precedent it's likely to take some time for the judges to get round to downloading everything for comparison). Because of the way I cut the text 'on the fly' as I typed it up, leaving out words and sentences as I went, this means effectively retyping and then re-editing the whole thing from scratch. Which is one reason why I've been delaying the task...

The other reason was that I'd been conscious more or less since I finished the first draft that I wasn't happy with the overall effect of the 'pregnancy scene' between Alan and Edith, despite the fact that this conversation was one of my original inspiration concepts for the story. And no, there isn't any mention of children by Edith in the current edit: I took advantage of the necessity to drop several thousand words to solve the problem by omitting that section of the scene altogether, and writing a new 'bridge' to the end (that vital first mention of "Lucille", originally appearing in a very different context!)( replacement requirements )

However... just for the sake of posterity and comparison, here is the original -- and unpolished -- draft of the scene, as it will no longer appear:
( Deleted scene )

Completed -- rather late in the day -- the main draft of my Writers Anonymous Christmas challenge Crimson Peak story. Unfortunately it has definitely come out far too long, at a total of eighteen pages; I actually did a word count for the first 2000 words and that came to about six and a half pages, so I've got five to six thousand words here for a story with a 4000-word limit. I could probably cut a few hundred to the story's overall benefit, and might cut a thousand with excessive violence. But reducing it to two-thirds of the original draft is a pretty tall order; if it can be done at all it's going to require omitting entire story elements, which is rather more easily done *before* you've written them than after they've been fully developed:-(
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