Looking for hope (first two chapters of Carnelian Lace, an Anita Blake fic I won't finish)

I have had a very interesting few days, writing-wise. I had been noodling on an idea for a while when, maybe three days ago, I started wondering if I might be able to do use the premise of the Hour of the Wolf (my Teen Wolf/MCU timetravel long-lost family story feat. Allison Argent) on something related to Anita Blake.

Note: It took me a whole day to remember had already done that in 2005 with Switchback, a story I didn't import over to AO3 as it's incomplete. (You can find it here; cw: rape)

Sometimes people say they only tell one story… and I just re-read Switchback and realized that I didn't create something new with Hour of the Wolf; I'd taken my one story and applied it to Teen Wolf.

Anyway.

A few days ago, when the idea occurred to me to apply the HotW premise to Anita Blake, I went all in, I was writing, I was plotting, and I had over 6,000 words together by the time I managed to think my way through to the end of the story…. And then I stopped. I realized that I absolutely do not want to write this story as it's set because there's no chance of a hopeful ending. The story starts with irreparable loss, and there's no way to fix that.

So I stopped.

In the interests of transparency (and because I like throwing dark-haired girls and their preternatural sidekicks back in time), I've posted what I have written below the cut:

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